Proper Gander: Anti-social media (2024)

The Proper Gander column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

ITVX’s recent drama serial Douglas Is Cancelled draws on several of society’s current trends to produce an unsettling description of how status impacts on people. Its writer, Steven Moffat, is known particularly for his contributions to more fantastical fare such as Doctor Who and Sherlock. His best scripts carefully guide how much information the viewers and characters have as the story progresses, often by playing around with story structure. Douglas Is Cancelled uses techniques (and actors) familiar from Moffat’s other work, with its subject matter being the television industry itself. Potential viewers are warned that ‘spoilers’ about how the plot is resolved are mentioned below.

The Douglas of the title, portrayed by Hugh Bonneville, is a longstanding TV journalist, co-hosting a popular news programme with the younger Madeline, played by Karen Gillan. A social media post accusing Douglas of telling a sexist joke at a wedding goes viral, leading to concerns among Douglas, his agent, and his producer Toby (Ben Miles), that enough of a negative reaction and suspicions of chauvinism will get him ‘cancelled’. The backdrop of social media being crucial in how we perceive people is a given. Anyone with a profile on X, Facebook, Instagram or TikTok knows they’ve put themselves in an arena where their words are scrutinised and judged publicly, with the stakes being higher for those already in the public eye, such as trusted television news presenters. Even a hint of scandal creates interest, and each repost, comment or like lucratively promotes the social media platform itself as well as whatever’s trending. The combative nature of online discourse is represented in the drama by Douglas’s teenage daughter, sensitive to any kind of perceived offence.

The focus of Douglas Is Cancelled isn’t ‘cancel culture’ though, but the culture of the news media industry. The script contains many cynical swipes at journalism, such as Toby saying of journalists, ‘having opinions about things we didn’t witness is the entire point of our existence’, and Madeline using ‘every dirty trick’ interviewers employ to get to their subject. Key to the plot is when Douglas angrily says ‘the truth needs a little help now and then… our audience wouldn’t understand the truth even if we had the guts to tell it or knew what it was in the first place’. In the context of the story, these lines lead to Douglas’s downfall because of how they dismiss both his audience and his profession, even though he’s right to recognise that journalism isn’t as objective as it pretends. The bias of a mainstream media outlet reflects the prerogatives of its owners, with their ‘truth’ being a stance which both reinforces their own position, however subtly, and less subtly, also attracts viewers and therefore income.

The media’s attitude to the truth isn’t really the focus of Douglas Is Cancelled, though. Its target turns out to be how the industry has mistreated women. Much of episode three is a flashback to just before Madeline secured the job as co-presenter, set in a hotel room where Toby is trying to manipulate her into having sex with him, using psychological tricks to confuse and control her. This thread of the story reminds us of the accusations of sexual harassment and rape made against American film mogul Harvey Weinstein and others, which revealed the extent of abuse in the industry. In the drama, Toby uses the influence he has as an established producer over Madeline, who is made vulnerable by being at the start of her career. He has this influence because of the imbalance of power between his position and hers. Employment, and the hierarchies which it involves, inherently encourages us to objectify people and treat them according to their status in the organisation. Some people, such as Toby and his real-life counterparts, represent how this attitude can lead to the most dehumanising and damaging extremes. The drama doesn’t only highlight how abusers have operated, but also that people like Douglas, who ignored the situation Madeline was in and then made jokes about it, enable the perpetrators. Even though the ‘casting couch culture’ is being exposed and tackled in real life, the conditions which create it remain.

Despite being promoted as a ‘comedy drama’, Douglas Is Cancelled describes a grim, sordid news industry, with relationships shaped by rank within the profession and by the cut and thrust of social media beyond. The similarities to real life situations make the serial very much a product of, and reflection of our times. But behind the modern trappings of social media and anti-social media executives, an old story is being retold. When a workplace, an industry and, indeed a society is structured so that some individuals are in a position of power over others, then the resulting hierarchies allow some people to become abusers. Legislation, policies and procedures aim to prevent and ameliorate harm, but can’t address the structural causes which enable abuse. Employment itself is exploitative, even if when it doesn’t involve people as toxic as presented in Douglas Is Cancelled. The damage caused by and to the characters is expertly acted by the serial’s small cast, helped by a precisely-crafted and perceptive script.

Mike Foster

Action Replay: From top to bottom (2024)

The Action Replay column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Being a successful sportsperson can obviously be very rewarding, in financial terms and also as a ‘celebrity’. But there can be a lot of stress involved in getting to, and staying at, the top. Those who are talented but are not among the élite often have to struggle to survive, let alone progress.

For instance, Billy Harris, now ranked fifth among British men’s tennis players, received a wildcard to play in this year’s Wimbledon championships, though he lost in the first round. But ten years ago he was travelling around Europe, from one tournament to the next, sleeping in his van and parking at McDonald’s. Each winning match earned him a couple of hundred euros, and in 2018 he was eventually able to get rid of the van and fly to destinations. But in comparative terms, he did quite well for, as a Lawn Tennis Association coach noted, ‘about 80% of his age group just faded away and stopped playing tennis.’ So perseverance and luck were about as essential as ability.

Writing in the Guardian (27 June), the former professional tennis player Conor Niland referred to the purgatory of playing in the lower tiers of the tour: ‘a liminal space that exists only to be got out of as quickly as possible’. Isolation and loneliness were constant features of travelling and touring, especially in small towns with little to do.

Back in the 1980s, professional golfer Chris Moody spoke to Danny Danziger for the latter’s All in a Day’s Work. It was, he said, a seven-day-a-week job, and one you had to work really hard at in order to make money. A tournament would occupy four days, and the rest of the week was taken up with travelling and practising. Being away so much meant it was ‘a very anti-social existence’, making personal relationships really difficult. And your brain tended to be dulled, as so much effort was put into planning and practising and watching your diet.

Moreover, getting to the top need not mean that everything will then go well. British cyclist Bradley Wiggins (famed for his sideburns) won the Tour de France in 2012 as well as Olympic medals. But he has now been declared bankrupt, with his company having massive debts. Wiggins had a troubled childhood, yet became a very successful cyclist. He retired in 2016, but then struggled to find a role in life. His marriage broke up, and he is reportedly sofa-surfing.

So sporting achievement can require a lot of work and often results in people falling by the wayside, and even success stories can lead to big problems.

Paul Bennett

Broken Britain (2024)

Book Review from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

How They Broke Britain. By James O’Brien. Penguin. 2023. £10.99

This is an entertaining and well-written book from the host of Britain’s most popular radio talk-show. It has been floating around the top of the best-seller lists for the last few months and it is easy to see why. It taps effortlessly into the view that Britain has been hopelessly misgoverned for years and it focuses – with a chapter for each – on a number of the leading players, from media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Paul Dacre and Andrew Neil through, inevitably, to the likes of Johnson, Truss and Sunak. Dominic Cummings also gets his own chapter.

As with all books of this type, there is a tendency to overstate the role politicians in particular play with regard to the state of the economy, though where the book is most successful is the focus it places on the ideological ties and networks that have underpinned and sustained the dominant political assumptions of our time. These are the view that ‘trickle-down’ economics has some merit, that the EU was both a singular barrier to UK economic growth and also to genuine democratic sovereignty, that the poor are poor because they are essentially feckless and that immigration is the major issue of our times that should be (pre-)occupying political minds everywhere. As the General Election demonstrated, they are dominant views that Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour has done little to challenge.

O’Brien is strongest when he writes in detail of the revolving door that exists between the right-wing think-tanks generating this stuff, the right-wing media and the recently departed Tory government. Many people will not have heard too much about the plethora of secretive ‘policy institutes’ and similar that exist in and around Tufton Street in Westminster, but they will have seen their representatives pop up with unerring regularity on news and current affairs programmes for years, opining in the manner of independent ‘experts’ – the Centre for Policy Studies, the Institute for Economic Affairs, Civitas, the Adam Smith Institute, Policy Exchange and the bizarre Taxpayers’ Alliance. These are the people who fomented and nurtured the likes of Liz Truss and O’Brien isn’t in a forgiving mood towards them.

The think-tank/media/political nexus that has dominated UK discourse for years and which has more recently formed ever more bizarre offshoots like the increasingly unhinged GB News, is indeed laid bare. It is good stuff and worth buying for this alone.

Less intuitively, there is also a chapter on Jeremy Corbyn, largely on the grounds that he failed to provide effective opposition to this nexus. Much of what O’Brien says here has resonance too, though occasionally he is a little unfair perhaps:

‘There used to be two ways for non-Conservative politicians to negotiate the UK’s hideously right-wing media: either you appeased them in the hope of avoiding their nastiest attacks or you took the fight straight to them and relied on sympathetic or impartial outlets to get your message out there. Corbyn and his closest advisers invented a third: completely fail to engage; alienate and demonise almost all journalists; claim constant victimhood; and offer up pathetic excuses when confronted with evidence of your own poor judgement’ (p.268).

Arguably, this is more Corbyn of 2019 General Election vintage, as earlier one of the more successful aspects of his period leading Labour was the way his supporters built up alternative media in opposition to the mainstream (even though he lost in 2017 too, it was narrow and this is something that helped him win over 6 percent more of the vote than Starmer did in his recent landslide, amounting to almost 12.9 million votes compared to Starmer’s 9.7 million). Indeed, while socialists have little to learn from the Corbyn experience generally, this aspect is interesting and O’Brien arguably seems to rather overlook the influence of alternative media like The Canary – which became the UK’s third most popular politics news website – and related social media.

This is a minor caveat though, and there can be little doubt that much of what O’Brien has written is a tour de force, exposing and cataloguing a network of pro-capitalist, right-wing goons who have just received an unexpectedly large – to most of them at least – kick in the ballots.

Dave Perrin

Danger: conspiracists at work (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The assassination attempt on Donald Trump immediately gave rise to a frenzy of conspiracy theories. One story that quickly spread was that the whole thing was staged by supporters of Trump. One US-based YouTube account said the picture was just ‘too damn perfect” and described how they got ‘the flag positioned perfect and everything’. But more widespread was the idea that assassination was ordered by anti-Trumpers of various kinds – the CIA, Barack Obama, Hilary Clinton, Mike Pence, or even Joe Biden. What has unfolded since then has been straight out of the conspiracy theory playbook with committed activists on social media who deny almost everything (the Covid pandemic, climate change, mass shootings, terror attacks) putting out a panoply of overwhelmingly improbable stories. In their minds not just one thing is suspect and said to be the subject of a hidden conspiracy but very many.

Another striking example of such ‘invented knowledge’ is the idea that ‘weather manipulating’ or ‘geo-engineering’ is taking place enabling governments to control both weather and climate for sinister purposes. Such stories have been around for some time but spread more widely in the UK recently based on the erratic and unusually cool weather experienced in June and July followed by one of the wettest winters in recent years. This is being done, so the claims say, by such methods as ‘cloud seeding’ (which does actually exist and was experimented with in the 1950s but shown to have only small, localised impacts) and ‘solar radiation management’. There is even talk of ‘chemtrails’, said to be a secretive plot to spray people with dangerous chemicals. As a result, according to the Royal Meteorological Society, weather forecasters have been on the end of significant abuse from conspiracy theorists on social media, accused of hiding truths about weather from the public. One user on ‘X’ wrote, ‘Imagine watching the geoengineers at work, and you report the weather without telling the truth about what really is going on. That is sick’. No attention is paid of course to the reality that, on a warming planet, warm air is able to hold more moisture, which in turn fuels more intense rainfall and erratic weather conditions. All this is dismissed as ‘climate scam propaganda’.

The BBC’s fact-checking service, ‘Verify’, which looks into stories circulating on the internet that may seem the result of some form of conspiracy theory or at least questionable, has found no evidence for such theories and credibly debunked them. But what one writer has termed ‘belief perseverance’ among conspiracy theorists persists even in the face of solid contradictory information and facts. Of course those who spread such ideas will say that the BBC is itself part of the conspiracy seeking to exercise control over people and the environment and take away their ‘freedoms’ and therefore its findings cannot be trusted. And it must be said that it has been ‘verified’ that in past times the BBC did function as a servile collaborator of the Secret Services when it came to the British state’s attempts to sniff out ‘subversion’.

Luckily the myths propagated by conspiracy theorists are rarely shared by whole populations, as they might have been in the past. They tend rather to exist among a certain segment of the population, perhaps as an expression of despair among people who find their existences particularly confusing, stressful and alienating, feel impotent to influence events or their own lives, and so seek consolation in such theories. It is only a pity that many other myths are shared by large swathes of people: for example worship of non-existent gods, devotion to leaders, the idea that one’s accidental country of birth somehow makes that place superior to others, and in particular the acceptance of class-divided society based on obscene wealth for the few and just getting by or dire poverty for the many as a natural and unchangeable way of organising human society.

Howard Moss

The Euros – how beautiful is the game? (2024)

From the August 2024 of the Socialist Standard

Many people in England will have been disappointed that England didn’t win their final. Yet records were broken, for example the maximum number ever of TV viewers for a football match, tens of thousands of people travelling abroad not to see a match live but to be in the country where it was taking place. There was also an outpouring of patriotism, jingoism, nationalism – call it what you like – probably never before witnessed over a sports event. But that’s what the system we live under is good at – distractions from the daily grind offering momentary thrills to mitigate the condition of powerlessness that most of us experience in our daily lives. Supporting a team, especially if it’s a winning one, may manifest itself, at least momentarily, as a kind of power – even if some would label it bread and circuses.

But what is that powerlessness of our daily lives? Largely it’s the necessity we are under to sell our energies to an employer for a wage or salary day in day out whether we get satisfaction or fulfilment from that activity or not. We ignore that at the risk of dire poverty or destitution. We spend most of our lives, as one commentator has put it, ‘under conditions of duress and unfreedom’. The exhilaration we may feel in supporting a sports team and witnessing it play – and hopefully succeed – in an event such as the Euros serves as a kind of poor substitute for the lack of opportunity to express our own talents freely in our daily lives.

Not of course that most people perceive the paid work they are forced to do for a living as a form of subservience or oppression, so docile have they been made by the conditioning process of the society they have grown up in. Part of this conditioning is the stress put on the need to regard as special and superior the country they happen to have been born into – so-called patriotism. This can even mean that, in the event of a conflict between the leaders of their country and the leaders of another, many people are willing to fight and even lay down their lives for the abstraction of patriotism.

Of course supporting your ‘national’ team is far from fighting a real war or laying down your life. In fact for many it’s a genuinely enjoyable experience. But the paroxysm of ‘national pride’ that an occasion such as the European Football Championship elicits and, last month, was encouraged at all levels is also a mirror of the unthinking worship of the idea of differences and divisions between men and women living in different parts of the planet –the anti-human mentality of better and worse, of winners and losers. Nothing could be more antithetical than that to the socialist pursuit of unity between peoples and the establishment of a stateless, borderless world of free access to all goods and services. In such a world, we will all be autonomous individuals pursuing our own goals and interests but at the same time exhibiting social reciprocity in all areas. In such conditions, apart from cooperating in work and production, we may also enjoy taking part in sport or watching and appreciating the skilful sporting activities of others but we will do this in a socially healthy way. It will no longer take the current grotesque form of fanatical fandom, of the passing thrill offered by a ‘hyped-up’ form of mass entertainment billed as a life-shattering event but in reality little more than a brief distraction from the daily grind of life under the buying and selling system that is capitalism.

Party News: Election results (2024)

Party News from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Socialist Party stood candidates in last month’s general election and also in the previous month’s elections to the Greater London Assembly. Here are the detailed results.

General Election

Clapham and Brixton Hill: Ribeiro-Addy (Lab) 24,166; Curtis (LD) 6,161; Yuen (Green) 5,768; Saroy (Con) 4,360; Matlock (Reform) 1,758; Key (Ind) 406; Martin (Soc) 122.

Folkestone and Hythe: Vaughan (Lab) 15,020; Collins (Con) 11,291; Wright (Reform) 10,685; Brett (Green) 3,954; Ngan (LD) 1,736; Khanom (TUSC) 249; Allen (Fairer Voting) 240; Thomas (Soc) 71. 

Greater London Assembly

Barnet and Camden: Clarke (Lab) 70,749; Redmond (Con) 51,606; Tokley (Green) 18,405; Emery (LD) 12,335; Forhad (Reform) 7,703; Martin (Soc) 1,369.

Lambeth and Southwark: Ahmad (Lab) 84,768; Sheppard (Green) 35,144; French (LD) 22,030; Wallace (Con) 22,121; Sharp (Reform) 8,942; Buick (Soc) 2,082.

SPGB August Events (2024)

Party News from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Our general discussion meetings are held on Zoom. To connect to a meeting, enter https://zoom.us/wc/join/7421974305 in your browser. Then follow instructions on screen and wait to be admitted to the meeting.

50 Years Ago: Ivan Illich, intellectual (2024)

The 50 Years Ago column from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

As the co-founder of the Centre for Inter-Cultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Illich seems to have a ready press for his ideas. His book, Deschooling Society, caused a minor explosion in the education world when it was published a few years ago. For those who do not have the time (or the patience) to read his “shrewd and passionate arguments” (The Guardian), BBC Radio 3 broadcast a long interview with him in April of this year. You can’t avoid him.

In the interview Illich explained his basic position, in this way: “It is my hypothesis that when the tools for production exceed a certain measure, they impose exploitative relationships on the society, no matter what political choice in ideological terms, the society thinks it has made.”

In other words, he is saying it is the size of the productive and other “processes” (eg, the education system) that is the cause of society’s problems. His favourite illustration is to compare the bicycle with the motor car. A “convivial society” he says “….can only arrive on the bicycle. With shoes alone we are not efficient enough. And with cars we are already over-efficient and impose an exploitative mode of production on the entire society.” (…)

It is on the basis of production for profit that cars are produced to snarl up the cities and pollute the air. Illich is right to point out the appalling effects on the planet we inhabit, but it is the profit system that draws forth cars from the witches’ brew of capitalism. Merely urging people to go back to bicycles is about as sensible as King Canute ordering back the waves.

Illich stated in the interview that the “convivial society” he wants can only be “a society which opts for voluntary poverty.” In other words he wants to abandon technological progress and put everyone in rags on a bicycle. (…)

Workers must learn to treat the ideas of such intellectuals with the contempt they deserve. A “convivial society” cannot be achieved by pedalling on a bicycle. Capitalism itself must be abolished, and a society based on common ownership must be established in its place.

(from Socialist Standard, August 1974)

Nothing to get excited about (2024)

From the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reporting the result of last month’s general election, Reuters said ‘Keir Starmer returned the Labour Party to power’. ‘Power’ is not the right word as it suggests that being the government gives its members more control than they actually have and in fact generally believe they have. It suggests that they have the power to control the economy and make it work as they want. However, the capitalist economic system operates according to economic laws which are beyond the control of governments, however resolute or well-intentioned those who compose them may be.

Of course, governments are not completely powerless. There are some things they can do. They control the armed forces and other means of coercion. On the economic field they can control the issue of the currency, levy taxes, grant subsidies and impose tariffs. But they do not control and cannot control the way the economy works. They can pass laws and draw up plans about economic matters, but this does not mean that these laws and plans can be implemented as envisaged nor, if they are, that they will have the intended effect. Capitalism is an economic system that operates according to its own economic laws which governments ignore at their peril.

These economic laws can be summed up as:

• the capitalist economy is an integrated world economy; there is no ‘British economy’ or ‘German economy’ or even ‘American economy’. What exists is a world capitalist economy which dominates all countries.
• since government activity does not produce any wealth, all the resources consumed by governments, whether for ‘defence’ or social reforms, have to come from the surplus over costs created in the productive sector of the economy, whether private or state.
• the private sector is motivated by the search for profits since these are the source of funds which private enterprises need to continue productive activity; in fact, making a profit is the only reason why this sector produces anything.

Given this, it is more accurate to say that when a party wins an election and gets to form the government what happens is that they come into office. Members of their party replace as ministers members of the outgoing party. It’s a replacement of decision-making personnel, but personnel without the power to make the economy work otherwise than it does.

It would be a rhetorical flourish to describe them as office clerks since they do have more decision-making power than that. A better term would be that are the middle management of the world capitalist economic system. Like middle managers they are given a remit from above with some leeway as to how to implement it. In the case of governments, the remit is to apply the economic laws of capitalism that dictate that priority must be given to profits and conditions for profit-making. Although the economic laws of capitalism are impersonal they are not self-enforcing but require personnel to enforce them, and this is what governments are alongside the executives of business enterprises.

All that happened on 4-5th July was a change of middle management. Nothing to get excited about.

Editorial: Instant recoil (2024)

Editorial from the August 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Outrage and condemnation poured forth from the forked tongues of world leaders at the ‘horrific and heinous’ assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which left him posturing bloodily but heroically unbowed, and soon plundering his spectacular PR gift for all it was worth (oh yeah, and y’know, sorry about the dead people, whatever). Biden once again failed miserably to rise to the occasion by describing the attempt as ‘not appropriate’. Smelling blood, press hacks were all too quick to drag up his embarrassing quote from only days before that it was ‘time to put Trump in a bullseye’. Things just couldn’t have got any worse for Geriatric Joe. After he’d staggered incoherently through a TV debate that left his supporters aghast and huge numbers of his own influencers publicly wanting him out, this rifle shot was the coup de grace. Biden duly quit, leaving lame-duck VP Kamala Harris with an impossible uphill battle and Trump the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut. His more wild-eyed acolytes even started wearing simulated ear bandages, as Trump’s bloodied ear raised him to mythic and, it would seem, unprosecutable status. They may bury him one day, but that ear belongs in a museum.

Some of the ‘outrage’ will have been for form’s sake. A lot of people might have privately wished the attempt had succeeded. Trump is a blustering renegade who can be expected to disregard facts or reason. His comments about a possible ‘third term’, in defiance of the constitution, have sown plenty of disquiet. His implied warnings about withdrawing support from NATO could spark a budget-busting arms race across the world as individual states look to their defences in the face of real or perceived threats from Russia or China. In practice though, the administration may well rein in his worst excesses.

Nonetheless, he is an abject and repulsive metaphor for capitalism’s screw-you ideology. Perhaps that’s why so many of the rich love him, and dismiss concerns about his MAGAlomania as Trump Derangement Syndrome. They don’t seem unduly worried that he might turn the powers of the state against them, if he decides he doesn’t like them. He’s one of them, after all. Meanwhile many poor Americans have somehow convinced themselves that this fraudulent, conceited, misogynistic man-baby is their best friend. Just like turkeys welcoming Thanksgiving.

The shooter, barely out of his teens and apparently a young conservative, tragically wasted his life for another delusion. Politicians, even populist demagogic ones like Trump, can’t change how capitalism fundamentally works, so shooting him wouldn’t make any difference. That’s thinking with the heart, not the head. He would just be replaced by someone else who, if not necessarily as personally repellent, would nonetheless still carry out the repellent work of managing the system in the interest of the rich, and entirely at the expense of the poor and the planet. And besides, socialists could never condone political murder. There really is only one solution to all this. If the collective misery of the 99 percent is ever to end, capitalism itself needs putting down.