Cooking the Books: Marx and the City (2022)

The Cooking the Books column from the January 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

The spectre of Marx seems to be haunting financial journalists. Patrick Hosking, the Times’s Financial Editor, opened his column on 7 December with: ‘Karl Marx was right about one thing. There are some remarkable contradictions at the heart of capitalism’. He instanced venture capitalists wanting to have their business quoted on the stock exchange when they chose their particular business model to avoid the regulations involved in being quoted. His explanation was materialist enough: it was because they wanted to convert their capital into shares that they could sell and rake in millions. Marx would not have regarded this as a capitalist contradiction, but would have seen it as normal financial capitalist behaviour once stock markets had emerged on a large scale, with the possible chance to engage in some dodgy dealing.

For Marx, the main contradiction within capitalism was, as explained elsewhere in this issue, that capitalism was essentially a system of capital accumulation out of profits but that the process of capital accumulation itself led to situations where profits fell, so interrupting accumulation. Such ‘crises’ would eventually be overcome and capital accumulation proceed only to be again interrupted at some future point by another crisis.

Engels pointed to another contradiction – that while production was a vast society-wide cooperative effort involving different producers in different places, the products were owned and controlled by a section only of society; a contradiction that could only be resolved by both the means of production and the product becoming the common property of society as a whole.

The previous week Chris Dillow began his column in the Investors’ Chronicle (2 December):

‘Like it or not, we need to think about class conflict because this is central to the question of where inflation is heading.’

He wasn’t talking about inflation strictly speaking (as a rise in the general level of prices caused by government policy) but about a rise in the price of a wide range of goods due to demand for them exceeding supply. Even the Bank of England is expecting prices to rise to a rate of as much as 5 percent in the not-so-distant future, but they are not worried as they expect this to be just a temporary misalignment between supply and demand which the market will correct. Agreeing with this analysis – and as if to answer in advance an article in the Times of 7 December by Paul Mortimer-Lee, the deputy director of the National Institute of Economic and Social research, headed ‘Bank should fire a warning shot to stop runaway wage rises’ – Dillow argued that the current increase in prices is not the result of ‘changes in class power’.

He is correct, but it is hard to think of any situation in which the working class would have the power to bring about a widespread rise in prices. Some, like Mortimer-Lee, invoke the 1970s when prices were rising at a much higher rate than today, sometimes in double-digits, with governments desperately trying to stop this by wage restraints and wages freezes. But this wasn’t workers triggering off a wages-prices spiral by using their ‘class power’ to push up wage costs and their employers responding by putting up their prices. It was workers trying to catch up with rising prices caused by governments creating extra money and thereby depreciating the currency. Rising prices started it, not ‘runaway wage rises’.

Dillow recognises that there is a class struggle going on between the capitalist class and the working class. That’s the big contradiction at the heart of capitalism and the only one that can bring it down.

What the papers don't say (2): The broadsheets (1999)

From the June 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

We conclude our examination of the capitalist press. Last month we dealt with the tabloids. This month it's the broadsheets.

Although there has been a general contraction of newspaper reading since the 1960s, there is one area that has bucked the trend: this is financial journalism. Here we find in the British press almost a model of probity. Financial reporting is factual, reasonably accurate, and does not exhibit any of the hysteria rightly associated with the downmarket press. Whilst the tabloids may be screaming blue murder about some take-over by a foreign company of an English one (a notable example was the take-over of Rover by BMW), the Financial Times, by comparison, will actually report the intricate financial details—the financial facts.Why does the financial press behave like this? The papers take the power of the City seriously; as well they might since the City is seriously powerful. The levels and detail of financial journalism have increased steadily in all the broadsheet papers since the 1960s. In that time the Financial Times has become, arguably, the most successful heavyweight paper. One can only begin to imagine what its corporate sales must be like; it is difficult to imagine a financial department or institution anywhere in Britain that does not take at least one copy of the Financial Times. Unlike the tabloids, the broadsheets print detailed and accurate business information. Who reads these papers? Why the capitalists and those who run their businesses of course! Bullshit for the workers—but information for the capitalists.The financial press has, over the years, gained autonomy from other sections of the press, and has also cultivated a really rather cosy relationship with Whitehall and its various departments. For instance Denis Healey, who could never be described as having an easy time of it with the press during the 1974-79 Labour government, described his relationship with the financial press like this:

"I regularly invited the top editorial staff of the leading newspapers to dinner, and accepted their invitations in return. I would discuss my problems frankly with them, and never had a confidence betrayed. As a result, at least they understood what I was trying to do, even if they did not approve of it. However much I deplored their criticisms, I rarely felt it was unfair. This was true at least of the so-called 'quality press', including newspapers which supported the Conservatives." (The Time of My Life, pp. 442-3).

One important and identifiable role that the financial press came to play in the politics of the 1980s was the switch away from Keynesian economic policies which unravelled so disastrously in the late 1970s, to the Chicago Monetarist policies which unravelled so disastrously in the late 1980s. The major players in this scenario were Samuel Brittan of the Financial Times, and Peter Jay, and William Rees-Mogg of the Times. Also important here was Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983-89, and who was a Financial Times journalist from 1956 onwards. All four of these men came from Oxford or Cambridge, and had remarkable family connections in the field of politics and finance, and were all converts to Friedmanite Monetarism. Wayne Parsons in his The Power of the Financial Press argues that the Times and the Financial Times introduced monetarism to Britain, ahead of the Treasury civil servants, the Bank of England, and the academic consultants.

In line with the increasing globalization of capitalism the Financial Times, in 1979, began its first foreign printing in Frankfurt. It currently gets 50 percent of its circulation and over half of its advertising revenue from outside Britain. The massive polarization is obvious: whilst The Sun exudes xenophobia "Up yours Delors", and "Hop off you Frogs", the capitalist papers of choice are international in scope, and provide hard facts.  

Lobby system

The tabloids deliberately limit the quantity and quality of their political coverage to screaming abuse, and then only for a small part of the paper, so as not to alienate the voters whose political party is being abused. The broadsheets, meanwhile, carry much more political news and comment. This is obtained through the lobby system. Very simply, this involves lobby journalists being allowed to speak informally to politicians in the lobby of the debating chamber in the Houses of Parliament; these stories can then be used on a "non-attributable" basis. Although television has impacted upon this scene with its various "on-the-record" interviews, the lobby system remains potent and mischievous. Here the picture gets very muddy indeed.

Politicians use lobby journalists to leak information that might:

• damage the opposition,
• damage a fellow politician with whom they have fallen out,
• to fly the kite as it were - to experiment with policy to see how it will go down,
• or simply as an opportunity to trade points of view.

This situation is made more problematic in that the lobby system is essentially self-policing, and self-censoring, according to unwritten and ill-defined rules. Nowadays the various spin-doctors are extremely adept at manipulating the journalists, in order to spin a story that may deflect attention from other things that are going on, or to put a different spin on another story from another non-attributable source, and so it goes on.

But arching over these various machinations is the market. Journalists need to move copy, and nothing does so like a crisis. Papers feed on crises. It is the media that provides the image and framework of "the crisis". Once the papers have reached the "crisis" conclusion, the government can either deny the crisis, and thus give the original story more weight and run the risk of "Crisis, what Crisis?" headlines, or ignore the situation and be accused of inaction and incompetence.

Jeremy Tunstall, in his book Newspaper Power, has identified a pattern to the media crisis. Once there has been one "crisis", this is usually followed by a couple more. Once the press's appetites have been whetted, and circulation temporarily increased by the "crisis"—another is the journalistic equivalent of manna from heaven, and so a rather ordinary event may be promoted to the crisis league.

So what have we learned? The press was recently described by the ex-chancellor Kenneth Clarke as a bucking bronco which he was continually forced to ride. For the Socialist the press can sometimes be a goldmine of information. Occasionally, in the oddest places, the press pay unwitting testimony to the lunacy of capitalism. We don't want to suggest for a moment, that there is nothing but lies in the press; rather that the capitalists, as the newspaper owners and users, as political movers and shakers, have the press as part of their armoury with which to dominate and subdue the working class.

At the same time they have inevitably created a warped and highly unstable instrument of communication, which has its own internal rules, and which plays a massive power game with the capitalists representatives in Parliament. The capitalists of the late twentieth century make sure that it is their message that gets across. Whilst the workers are encouraged to be parochial and xenophobic when the occasion demands, the capitalists and their papers have expanded their field of operations world-wide.

Intellectual vacuum

Newspapers exist in a dialectical relationship with the capitalist system, "bucking bronco", "a snapping rottweiler"; this kind of metaphor has been used by the politicians who benefit from press coverage. However, the press is there to sell papers and who can predict what they are going to have to do in future in order to achieve this.

There is a literary theorist called Pierre Macherey who wrote in his book A Theory of Literary Production that "a text says what it does not say". His argument is that the silences in a book or a play or indeed a newspaper are as significant as what is said. It is the work's silences that give it form. He argues that in order to really know a work we must, in his words, "move outside it". Then to question the work: "the work has its margins, an area of incompleteness from which we can observe its birth and its production. It is not what the work refuses to say that is important, but rather what it cannot say". Put simply we have to read between the lines, but more than that we have to understand why we are having to read between the lines, and to understand why certain things cannot be said by the press.

For example, when increased emphasis upon personalities replaces real political debate—this happens in all the papers and is justified by extremely erudite pieces in the heavyweights—why does this happen? From a Socialist's point of view it's easy: image increases in directly inverse proportion to content. The Nazi Nuremberg rallies were all lights, loud music, excessive amounts of Wagner, and ranting meaningless rhetoric; a bit like Tory and Labour conferences of today (except without the Wagner). The Nazi's rhetoric of blood and soil had to be couched in these terms, because like the politics of today it was an intellectual vacuum.

The future will re-evaluate the tabloids not for what they said, but for what they did not say. Imagine being in the position of having to explain to a couple of aliens from outer-space why the gold-blend couple (the couple from an advert) were given front page status in the biggest-selling newspapers in the land, when a third of the population of the world were starving. A monumentally difficult task to do without slipping into platitudes.

In a sane world information would be available not because it was saleable, but because it was necessary. Some information is boring, but necessary; some is interesting and fun. All will be available in a socialist society without the distorting lens of the market getting in the way to inflate, downgrade, change, or otherwise manipulate the information we need.

It's easy to disbelieve everything we read in the papers, the more difficult job is to realize what we are not reading in the papers, to identify where the silences and areas of incompleteness lie. Socialist understanding undoubtedly makes this job easier, but it is faced with a deluge of scrambled and partial truth, unconscious misrepresentation, and downright lies. Karl Marx once said, "The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business activity". How right he was.

Jacek Krause