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).

Political Olympics: round 2

Jonathan Agnew's umbrella confiscated by Olympic brand police

David Cheeseman, a cameraman working for the BBC at Lords yesterday [30 July], also tweeted that a "LOCOG brand protection lady" had stuck black tape over the names "Canon", "Sony" and "Satchler" on his equipment because they were not official sponsors. 

Yesterday:

German rower sent home because her lover is in an un-PC [but not illegal] far right group

Chinks in the armour

Zambian miners kill Chinese manager during pay protest, reports the BBC.

China's strategy in Africa has been subtle: exploit the African's mistrust of their former colonial masters in Europe by presenting them with an unmilitarised alternative form of developing the continent whilst extracting key resources for the motherland and sending Chinese managers to factories and mines to ensure that the model runs smoothly.

Not so smoothly, it turns out.

Nevertheless, China is playing the long game, suffering short-term losses absorbed within its huge capacity as it buys up operations left fallow by Western firms who focus unreasonable quantities of effort on unreasonably short-term strategies of portfolio optimisation.

Watch this space: resource control was, is and ever will be the only purpose of geopolitics.

Political Olympics: twitter antics

Bad tweet saw Greek OC drop athelete...

Despite her apology, pressure continued to mount for Papahristou to be removed from the Greek Olympic team

...

‘It’s the same as violating fair play,’ [head of Greece’s Olympic mission] told a Greek television station.

How, when it had nothing whatsoever to do with the sport with which she is involved, or any sport for that matter?

 ...another bad tweet sees Swiss athlete sent home

In a statement, Gian Gilli, the head of the Swiss Olympic delegation, said that Morganella, 23, had “said something insulting and discriminatory” about the South Korean soccer team. 
 ...
In a separate statement, Morganella said that he had “made a huge mistake” by sending the Twitter message after the game and that he was “truly sorry for the people in South Korea, for footballers, but also for the Swiss delegation and the Swiss football in general.”  


MP in the shit with the PM for complaining about the opening ceremony


The worst:

Hunt for Tom Daley Twitter troll: seaside police raid nets suspect, 17

A 17 year old boy tweets that an athelete has let down his father. I feel for the athlete (his dad died last year), but should this really be an arrestable offence? The worst thing is, people actually felt the need to report the comments to the police.

Romanzo Criminale: La Serie 1 – a review

To judge from the credits alone - brief glimpses of shades-wearing men having seedy conversations; shots of wads of lira; guns - RC is either a shitty cheesy crime drama set in the 70s in the vein of the Professionals, or a cool Goodfellas-style fast-paced anthropological study of Italian crime in Italy. Even the promo photo looks shit. Happily, this story of the real-life Banda della Magliana is neither; fortuitously, it is the greatest TV programme maybe ever.

It is a bildungsroman of a gang, centring on its leader, small-time hood Lebanese, who lives in a small caravan by the Tiber. Inevitably, he forges alliances with local hoods and runs risks with dogged determination as they come up against better-connected foes and the sinister Camorra. So far so Scarface. But we who know little about the Banda in advance of its screening are never given the sense that their rise to power will be inevitable in the same sense as a Hollywood gangster epic. Limited by their running time, the big screen bildungsroman defaults to vignettes, presenting the trajectory of character in a single unvarying gradient, always seeming like an abridged biography retold by an omniscient narrator. Romanzo Criminale's format, whilst conforming to type with its 12 intriguing introductions and 12 cliff-hanger endings, allows many twists and set-backs and seems much closer to a geniune thriller than a morality tale, which is effectively what Scarface, Goodfellas, et al. are. In fact, the gang's transition from small-time hoodlumry to the big stage establishes once and for all supremacy of the novel and the TV series over story, film and stage in matters of exposition.

Most interesting is the fact that RC is set during Italy's anno di piombi. This is the most triumphant detail in the series. The historical gravitas of Italy's torrid recent past elevates Criminale way, way above run-of-the-mill crime dramas and makes HBO centrepieces like the Sopranos look like a dreary soap-opera and Life on Mars like the fantasy it is (people with no historical sense have compared it to both). The series begins like the flashbacks in Godfather Part 2 and hits another level when Aldo Moro is kidnapped by the Red Brigades. It is the crucially-important historical backdrop which makes the Italian state itself - in the form of the shady secret service, the identity of whose acolytes we see interspersed throughout the series, is only very slowly revealed - complicit in breaking the rule of law in exactly the same way as the Banda did. They are morally equivalent, these murdering thieves from the poor part of Rome and the security service, the writers tell us. The facts bear out the claim.

BP wasn’t alive to experience the 1970s in Italy, so we will refrain from posturing about its historical authenticity, but it looks and feels like a different, grubbier, less technologically sophisticated era and one familiar from archive footage. We know that the 1970s in Western Europe saw serious threats to the established order in the form of Communism, trade unionism, terrorism (Red, Black and anti-colonial) and, perhaps most of all, the Yom Kippur War and the resulting oil crisis of 1973. The piece of the pie seemed to get smaller across the West. A new, grubbier realism set in after the optimism of the 60s. It even saturated Hollywood. Watergate happened. Baader-Meinhof were running crazy across West Germany. The British army were shooting civilians in Ulster. Men were dressing up as women and pretending to be space aliens with 1950s’ licks. The US pulled out of ‘Nam, unable to defeat a determined army of peasants with AKs. Were the liberal values of the West falling apart? Was Communism going to take over?

The Years of Lead as presented in Criminale show the audience that Italy, far from being the land of fashion, pasta and football familiar to English-speaking contemporaries, was - is - an intensely political nation divided, like much of Europe, into three camps by its reaction to Anglo-capitalism. Firstly, the left, the Red Brigades and Anarchists, who kidnapped and murdered the Prime Minister of Italy, Aldo Moro in 1978 (we are given a glimpse of this through Inspector Scaiola's relationship with his Red sister); then the right, the fascists and Mussolini revivalists, whom we see when the fascist adventurer Nero (brilliantly played by an Iggy Pop lookalike) needs someone to launder his money; and finally, the centre, the dominant party of acquiescent capitalists after the fall of Mussolini, typified by Berlusconi. It is in the centre where the Banda (in spite of its links to NAR) and their nemesis Inspector Scaiola exist. The Banda believe in money, Scaiola in reason, together the two values uniting the centre faction: capital and law, the means of enforcing capital. By contrast, the secret service seem like out-of-control puppet masters, unsure which marionette to play with more. According to the producers, they played the Banda over Scaiola and the Right over the Left. But they don’t want more money and, as far as we can tell, they don’t want a second Duce.

The dichotomy between rifht and left resolved itself and the Years of Lead ended, but not before 85 people were blown up in Bologna. So, what of the era hinted at by the end of the first series of Romanzo? Governments calmed down, or got better at covering themselves up. The populace was tired of terrorism and pacified by the financial boom of the 1980s. Liberal markets triumphed across most of the world in 1991; Kojeve’s end of history thesis came to fruition. Francis Fukuyama updated it with an audacious piece of backwards clairvoyance. Markets opened up to freer trade. Governments trusted each other to be more predictable than in the 70s and real political choice between Red, Black and Centre was replaced with consumer choice. Companies, too, reacting to legislation to better secure national income, sought to make revenues more predictable, employing Black-Scholes and the personal computer to master the future and conquer risk (suggested further reading: Galbraith’s Affluent Society).

We live in a world a start-up Banda would have dreamed of – the approval and promotion of crass materialism, the ability to get-rich-quick and the chaos of globalisation as a smoke screen for their underworld activity. If the NAR or the CPI had got into power, they would have been toast.

More on the Banda:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banda_della_Magliana

Change.org: coming to a protest near you, UK

Link.

Commentators will be quick to assess the importance and the magnificence of an online petition system which can – and has – drummed up support for initiatives as diverse as opposing Bank of America, obtaining support from Apple for its Chinese workforce and ensuring that lynchmob justice prevails in the bizarre Trayvon Martin case.



Yes, the selfsame commentators who laud the arrival of the phenomenon on these shores I doubt will like to see the millions of signatures appended to populist petitions for member states to quit the EU (now inevitable), for death sentences to be handed out to child killers and for immigration to be stopped dead.


Democracy – genuine democracy, i.e., populism – is a rollercoaster and must not be confused with our current staid system of politics. I’m talking about managed democracy, with its quinquennially-elected professional politicians, who are under no obligation to vote how their constituents want them to, which is like a centrally-planned version of democracy in a similar way that ‘managerial capitalism’is the centrally-planned version of entrepreneurial capitalism.
 
As the internet is a threat to managerial capitalism, so change.org could be a threat to managed democracy.



But if they think they can waltz into China they’ve another thing coming.

US 'gearing up to attack Iran', says Russia

So sayeth the Russkies here.

Iran is three times the size of Iraq.


http://www.world-maps.co.uk/maps/600-middle_east.jpg

Theses on the 'arms race' of rationalism

1. The ‘arms race’ that proceeds apace in all aspects of modern life, arises from the entrenchment of rationalism as the objective touch-stone of society, and characterises the motives of present-day social and economic life.

2. All other objective forms of valuation – religion, art, culture, race – have fallen by the wayside, either through design or the passing of the years.

3. We have arrived at the reductio ad absurdum of rationality. We cannot avoid it; we’re placed so firmly on the lines of rationalism that no other paradigm (religious, cultural, social, or political) can compete. All paradigms previously ascendent in the history of mankind are truncations of this one.

4. The arms race arises from Western thought and mechanics. Materially speaking, it is determined by the division of labour as the maximisation of output. Perhaps it has always been man’s goal to exploit to the fullest the resources both natural and human that are to hand. But it is our modern age that has perfected this goal. In perfecting this goal we have overcome the problem of scarcity that has hung over man’s head since the dawn of his time.

5. One can observe the gradual entrenchment of rationalism reaching back to the use of tools in the hunt. But let us take an example from our time: Shareholding and profit. On a microeconomics level, profit is the objective indicator of an end in itself for a business. Shareholders do not get into the business of owning shares for any other reason than that they wish to improve the health of the stocks they own. If one gets into business for ‘sentimental’ reasons, then he is destined for hard times. In the business world, all principles, morals and values are ancillary to the production of surplus value, determined as the rational end to which the energies of a business are employed. In business, profit is the objective indicator of an end in itself for a business. The macroeconomic goal of a business is to provide value and output to the general economy, which makes all modern life possible.

6. The arms race described here is an offshoot of the development of a self-conscious normativity, which was the first revaluation of values for modern Europe. We are living with this normativity problem today. It comes originally from the development of Reason nurtured by the increasing self-confidence of the bourgeois class, and latterly from the incredible proliferation of rationality and the subsequent diffuseness that this proliferation of Reason has given rise to. The ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ is nothing more than an account of this latter diffuseness of perspectives and material progress that Reason enables.

7. The arms race – as the unification of the management of resources, populations (as labourers) and discourses – cannot be stopped. This is not in itself a negative judgment, but an outline of the likelihood of success for those who oppose it.

The Problem of Modernity

I'll characterise Modernism after the fashion of Habermas. We are living in Modernity’s shadow, the shadow of the completeness and exhaustion of all forms of life, like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who chillingly finds himself bored and sated with heaven as with hell and everything in between. We are at once trapped by the bureaucratisation of all life, to which we can offer no original contribution (Weber's point), and by the stunning emptiness of this bureaucratisation, whose grip is not so firm that it provides a set of values by which we can live as people used to before the 'curse' of rationalism. Modernity is:-

The fleetingness of time and experience (recognition that fashions become outmoded, that one will oneself be outmoded; that history marches on and the past is simply 'left behind');

Revolutionary (rebellious) spirit of the age - we see countless rebellions against the strictures of our civilisation. We see liberal revolutions against the lingering traces of a feudal or aristocratic order (1789-1848); socialist revolutions against capitalism, against property (1848-1917; the latter continues in a rejection of consumerism); nationalist revolutions against the entire discourse of modern life (against capitalism and socialism) (1923-45); bourgeois counterrevolutions against the radical revaluation of modern morality by Fascism and Communism (1939; 1945-1991); uprisings against the social order (May 1968), etc ad nauseum. Every rebellion takes it upon itself to revolutionise and subvert, or to defend and make permanent, the rational order of life.

Longing and yearning – for myth (return to the gods of the blood; Völkisch yearning for unity), for community (Gleichschaltung; yearning for consensus); and the longing for freedom from history or authority (Marxist, anarchist).

Belief that one is in a state of perpetual ‘crisis’;

Overcoming ‘closed’ systems of knowledge and representation – refusal to accept the canon of arts, sciences and morals;

Irony and cynicism;

The ‘sin’ of having too much knowledge to cope with it meaningfully (as in Goethe’s Faust), and its poignant obverse, the torture of not having enough knowledge to solve all of the world’s problems.

If one views Modernity thus denuded, one can look on it like a comedy. This is a cast list of a comedy. I hold no truck with the perpetual revolutionaries; I want to laugh at them. The choice is either to struggle against the inevitable discourse of Modernity or to wait for its collapse, as Nietzsche did (and which Spengler predicted).