Voice From the Back: Hobson’s choice (2015)

The Voice From the Back column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Hobson’s choice

You have found work in the city but need somewhere to live, your choice is limited. ‘The shockingly bad rental flats, based mainly in Britain and the US, repeatedly appear online among lists of the worst homes available to rent. In one cheeky advert, a tent in the garden of a property in San Francisco is being advertised for £458 per month, while another ambitious landlord has listed a cupboard in Paddington, west London, for £160 per month. Elsewhere in Rheims, France, a room with a shower and toilet fitted next to the kitchen sink will set tenants back £169 per month, while a horrendously cramped room in Islington, north London, with a kitchen doubling up as a bedroom will set tenants back a staggering £730 per month’ (Daily Mail, 4 September).

Embarras de richesses

We produce but do not possess. Indeed, ‘for every dollar of wealth created, 93 cents goes to the top 1%’ (truth-out.org, 3 September). Members of the owning class can live where they want when they want. In preparation to accommodating King Salman bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia and his huge entourage last month one five star hotel, closed to other guests, was transformed. Crates containing golden mirrors, end tables, lamps and hat racks were unloaded and red carpets ‘laid down in hallways and even in the lower parking garage’ so that the parasites did not ‘have to touch asphalt when departing their custom Mercedes caravan’ (Politico, 3 September).

Killing is my business

The Saudi ruling class, backed by the USA, is using armed workers and advanced weaponry to enforce regime change in neighbouring Yemen.

Wars raging in the Middle East and elsewhere mean business is good for arms manufactures such as Textron. This Massachusetts-based manufacturer of cluster bombs, helicopters and jets had its stock upgraded recently ‘fromneutral to buy by a Citigroup analyst’ (vocativ.com, 4 September). The brutal Saudi regime, which has beheaded more people than the Islamic State so far this year, has used cluster bombs in Yemen.

Migrant misery

War is undoubtedly one of the main reasons why millions have been, and continue to be, murdered, mutilated or forced to migrate. Over 2000 people have died taking the perilous but profitable for some journey from Libya to Europe. There is money to be made out of such misery: ‘with militias controlling large swathes of land, their attentions have turned to the people who cross their territories. The fighters assert they are bringing order to the country as they detain the refugees, yet these people’s lives have become valuable commodities to the militias as they try to solidify their positions in the country’ (vice.com, 4 September).

Hell awaits

You have the stuff of migrants’ dreams: somewhere to live and a place of work, but neither are secure. Your life is still at risk. Examples of death at work are legion, The BBC reported recently (1 September) that a ‘Dundee company has admitted health and safety failings after a worker died while cleaning out a chemical tank … The 33-year-old was sent in to remove debris from a chemical tank with limited protective clothing in August 2011… Dundee Sheriff Court heard that Mr Conway was sent into the tank containing volatile chemicals while wearing only trainers, tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt and fleece.’

Slowly we rot

Somehow you reach the ever-increasing age at which you can draw your dwindling pension (delayed wages), but are you in any condition to enjoy your retirement? Is a care home on the horizon? ‘England’s care home regulator has repeatedly failed to act on official warnings from coroners in cases where elderly residents have died unexpectedly, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has found. The Bureau has examined 23 cases in which coroners warned that people could die in future if care providers did not make changes’ (The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, 2 September).

Defend the indefensible

This is what the head of the Care Quality Commission said he was not going to do in relation to the above, but the 1% are happy to defend capitalism – at a safe distance. Yet maybe the Egyptian billionaire who ‘has offered to buy an island off Italy or Greece in order to rehouse hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing Syria and other conflicts’ (Daily Telegraph, 4 September) is on to something. Come the revolution, any expropriated capitalists who do not want to live in a world of production for use and free access could be accommodated on such an island.

50 Years Ago: Los Angeles Erupts (2015)

The 50 Years Ago column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

For a few days the spotlight was switched from the ever present horror of Vietnam and focussed on the United States itself.

Los Angeles, that most modern of cities – if such an outdated word as city can be used to describe a sprawl of over 452 square miles – erupted into violence. In an orgy of looting, arson and killing the Negro population, so often the victims of mob violence, themselves became the mob. The savage details were too well reported to need repeating, but many thousands of troops were needed to crush what amounted to a rebellion. When it was over, needless to say the Negroes were the worst-hit victims.

The suppression of the Negro, lasting for a hundred years after their “liberation,” ranging from murder to petty discrimination, and running through all strata of society, has produced a distrust and hatred that will take a very long time to overcome. At every moment and in every possible way, the Negro is made to feel inferior.

Such a situation, and the fact that it could be changed, must lead to an explosion. Los Angeles has been a modern legend, that personifies the so-called affluent society, the world of mass-produced commodities in profusion. Brash and ugly, a mass of sprawling suburbs and six-lane freeways where public transport has practically disappeared, the Watts-Willowbrook area where the explosion occurred is known as the Black Ghetto. Can anything illustrate the plight of the American Negro more than the use of this medieval word to describe the conditions of workers in an ultramodern city?

The riot was crushed, but as long as hatred between workers remains on such a scale and is added to the normal tensions and frustrations of capitalism, such eruptions will continue.

(from News in Review, Socialist Standard, October 1965)

Need a New Bike? Want to Destroy the Devil? (2015)

The Halo Halo! column from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

You heard, perhaps, about the little boy sitting on his doorstep one Sunday morning crying his eyes out. ‘What’s the matter?’ asked the vicar as he passed on his way to church. ‘I want a bike’ sobbed the little boy, ‘All my friends have got one and I haven’t’. ‘Have you tried praying for a bike?’ asked the vicar. ‘Prayer is a wonderful thing. It can solve all your problems’.

So for the following week the little boy prayed every morning, but the next Sunday when the vicar passed there he was again, still in tears, and still without a bike.

‘You must have faith’ said the vicar, ‘and don’t stop praying. Prayers can solve all your problems’. So the little boy carried on praying every morning and sure enough, a couple of weeks later when the vicar passed, there was the little boy on his doorstep with a big smile on his face, and a beautiful, brand new, shiny red bike.

‘What did I tell you?’ said the vicar. ‘Isn’t prayer a wonderful thing?’ ‘Yes’, said the little boy. ‘You were right. Prayers can solve all your problems’. ‘What happened?’ asked the vicar. ‘Well I prayed really hard every morning’ said the little boy, ‘just like you said, but by Friday I still didn’t have a bike so I went out and stole one. Then I prayed to God to forgive me. And he did’.

Getting a new bike, though, would be a piece of cake for real believers. For the more ambitious there are numerous books available that explain, for a few dollars a go, not only how to make sure God is paying attention when you list your requirements, but how to beat the living daylights out of Satan while you’re at it.

You could start with ‘Discerning the Voice of God’ ($11.69). ‘Do you feel that the ability to hear God’s voice is for other people and not for you?’ asks its author. Don’t worry. With a little practice anyone can get into conversation with the voices in their head.

Or how about, ‘Prayers for Victory in Spiritual Warfare?’ ($10.59) ‘The enemy of your soul has gained the upper hand’, we are told. But again, nothing to worry about. ‘God has given you powerful weapons to help you withstand the onslaught of  Satan’s lies’.

And don’t miss ‘Fervent: A Woman’s Battle Plan to Serious, Specific and Strategic Prayer’ ($10.05) by Priscilla Shirer who, the advertising blurb assures us, is a ‘Prayer warrior’.

‘You have an enemy’ we are told, ‘and he’s dead set on destroying all you hold dear. This book is your chance to strike back. With prayer. With a weapon that really works. Each chapter will guide you in crafting prayer strategies that hit the enemy where it hurts’.

Blimey, that’s a bit strong. We assume Priscilla the Prayer Warrior’s number one enemy is the devil, but aren’t Prayer Warriors supposed to love their enemies? This makes those Catholic exorcisms that come complete with candles, a crucifix and garlic, look like a picnic in the park. Still, if you can get a new bike out of it . . . 

NW

Truths, Half-Truths and Lies (2015)

From the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Truth is a troublesome concept, and not just for the ‘bad guys’. For hundreds of years philosophers have sought to define its meaning and understand its efficacy in relation to our world. It has undergone many incarnations including: correspondence truth, coherence truth, pragmatic truth, linguistic truth and its final nemesis, the redundancy theory. It is said that in the dead of night the post-modernists can be seen to dance on truth’s grave. But it has proved to be a most resilient idea that is still valued by most of us even if we fail to articulate just what it is. We can readily identify its antithesis – a lie or false-hood. In contemporary politics ‘propaganda’ is a word many use for false claims or downright lies.

We in the Socialist Party have had a relaxed relationship with the word 'propaganda', using it in its original sense as involving the propagation of ideas. But reading these words and the other articles in this journal an objective reader might very well suspect a ‘bias’ in our analysis of politics, history and economics. We don't deny the existence of a clear perspective – every word is aimed at serving the political cause of the great majority (the working class). This being the case, how can the Socialist Standard hope for journalistic 'balance', or be considered as anything other than ‘propaganda’ both in terms of its perspective and in the possibility that we might manipulate information to suit our political aims? In other words can the reader have any confidence in the truth of what we write?

Different perspectives

Consider the phrase: ‘High profits and property prices are good for the economy’. This represents mainstream journalistic bias since it disallows the possibility of any disaffection from accepted political norms within a capitalist context. What is ‘good for the economy’ is identified with what is good for the owners of the mainstream media and their chums – the parasitic minority. To the majority the statement means a higher rate of exploitation at work and yet another barrier to finding a place to live. Can both perspectives be simultaneously true?

Different perspectives of the same phenomena can result in opposite interpretations and conclusions. Can ‘what is good for the economy’ be bad for those who make it work? Is the truth or otherwise of all political statements dependent on this type of class perspective? Then consider this statement: ‘Capitalism can only work in the interests of the capitalists and against the economic interests of the majority’. This claim would seem to be above and outside the political context that defines class perspective. It claims a more objective and historical account of an economic relationship. But is it true?

You will never read such a statement within the mainstream media for reasons that are self evident. They cannot claim that: ‘Yes it is true that the system makes the rich richer and the rest are unimportant’ even if they know this to be the case. Perhaps this is one of many important distinctions between our ‘propaganda’ and that of those who defend the capitalist system; everything we write we believe to be true but, given that not all of our opponents are just plain stupid, it is very hard to believe that they can have any faith in the integrity of what they write. One always suspects that they smile privately about their own cynicism in protecting their interests at every opportunity; from the persecution of the poor to the ridiculous claim that the rich exist because ‘they work hard’ or are ‘geniuses at innovation’.

Compromising

Another criticism that socialists encounter is that truth is said to be never ‘black and white’ and that our uncompromising political stance is impractical and sectarian. To compromise does have a reassuring mature patina to it but if we are correct that capitalism in all its forms is diametrically opposed to the majority’s economic interests what is it exactly that we’re supposed to compromise on? The Left regard it as a victory if they are allowed to collect a few more crumbs from the rich man’s table (minimum wage etc.). But if a person steals your wallet and returns it minus two thirds of its content then it is still reasonable to regard them as thieves.

For over a hundred years the Left has made one compromise after another and what has it to show for all their boot-licking reforms – people in higher debt, later retirement, low wages, family breakdown, trade union enfeeblement etc., etc. Just as Oliver Cromwell allowing compromise after compromise with Charles I in his feeble bourgeois attempt to keep his king on the throne led to just more bloodshed so we have reached an historical situation where compromise is seen as weakness and is politically pointless. The story of the frog and the scorpion comes to mind: the scorpion asked a frog to give him a ride on his back so that he could cross the river. The frog said ‘but you’ll sting me and we’ll both die’. The scorpion made a solemn promise he would not do so and the frog took him. Halfway across the scorpion stung him. As they both sank to their deaths the frog asked: ‘why did you do that?’ The scorpion replied: ‘It’s in my nature’. So it is with capitalism; any attempt at compromise and reform will just prolong the world’s agony. In this respect the truth is ‘black and white’ and no pleading with the beast will make it any greyer.

The witness’ oath: ‘I promise to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ may be a very high and even unobtainable ideal in political terms but any compromise in aspiring to it must lead to a loss of moral integrity. All we can promise you is that everything we write is done in good faith with the single aim of revealing the truth about the politics of capitalism and the meaning of socialism. We have no other agenda. If ‘truth’ is regarded as anachronistic by some intellectuals then so be it – we believe that the complexity of a concept does not necessarily render it useless. We live in a world of political spin, half-truths, marketing and lies.

Socialism is not just another political commodity that we are trying to sell. Superficially it may appear to the politically naïve as just another leftist variation swamped by so many other groups misusing the term ‘socialist’. In the end perhaps we can only glimpse parts of the truth, but to ignore the concept entirely is to flirt with the disaster of Orwellian ‘business speak’ where: ‘War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength’.

Wez.

Lion That Failed to Roar? (2015)

Book Review from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Orwell’s Faded Lion. Anthony James. Imprint Academic. £14.95. 2015.

The focus for this book is the ‘Moral Atmosphere of Britain 1945-2015’ as the subtitle would have it, and it is an entertaining and potentially thought-provoking read. The book examines the evolution of British society since Orwell wrote about Britain as the Second World War was coming to an end. James has travelled widely and he is able to draw on many of his experiences to give a comparative slant to his observations. He especially focuses on Britain’s insularity and failure to live up to the revolutionary hopes he says Orwell had for it.

He writes from a generally radical and leftist perspective without any transparent alignment with any particular political party. As often seems to be the case with books like this, much is traced back to the Thatcher era and its shortcomings, though perhaps without a full recognition of the wider economic forces within capitalism that brought this sort of phenomenon about (including, over time, in other countries).

While well-written in many respects, the book suffers structurally. This is mainly because it is part political tract, partly a collection of literary critiques and part personal memoir. It is the latter that appears to be its greatest strength – while the politics is quite strong on the analysis there seems little by way of clear solution proffered, while the literary sections read rather like a series of mini-book reviews of the works of the major authors of post-war British fiction melded together, not altogether successfully. The style is journalistic and the narrative thread that links these various elements is not perhaps as strong as it might be.

The best section relates to a period James spent in a South Wales hospital and turns out to be the inspiration for the book. It examines the treatment he received, the conditions of the hospital workers and – most perturbing of all – the views of a number of the fellow patients he was forced to share a ward with. Let’s just say the fact that UKIP got around 20 per cent of the vote in many South Wales valley seats at the recent General Election is entirely consistent with the account here and the interpretation James places on it. The challenge is still how to transform these types of views within the working class and the assumptions that seem to underpin them.

Dave Perrin

Recent Times (2015)

Book Review from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Charlie Chaplin', by Peter Ackroyd. Vintage £7.99.

Charlie Chaplin was born in a South London slum in 1889. His childhood was extremely impoverished, including spells in a workhouse, and his first show-business job was as a clog dancer at the age of nine. He became an actor and stage performer, joined Fred Karno’s company and travelled to the US, where he made his first film in 1914. He survived the birth of talkies and became a director and independent film-maker. Already by 1915, according to Ackroyd, he was the most famous man in the world.

Chaplin was best known for his screen persona as the Tramp, the ‘little fellow’ who became a kind of universal symbol of failure and hopelessness. Some of his films were overtly political, such as The Great Dictator (1940), where he played Adenoid Hynkel. This applied in particular to Modern Times (1936), about factory life and the repetitive and dehumanising nature of the production line.

In the First World War, he decided to stay in the US rather than return to the UK and risk being conscripted; people sent him envelopes with white feathers in, and some British cinemas stopped showing his films. During the Second World War, he made remarks supporting the ‘Soviet Union’ as a wartime ally, and also expressed some admiration for Stalin. Together with the implied message of Modern Times, this led in the late 1940s to trouble with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Some thought it suspicious that he had lived in the US for thirty years without becoming a US citizen, and in 1952, as he and his family sailed to Britain, his permit to re-enter the US was withdrawn (though he was later allowed to visit). For some discussion of his political views, see www.cartoonresearch.com/gerstein/chaplin/commie.html.

Ackroyd describes Chaplin as ‘a libertarian with tendencies towards anarchism’. But this is hardly compatible with his authoritarian approach to directing, his support for President Roosevelt, and his chauvinistic attitude to women. He also accepted a knighthood and was very concerned to protect his US-based property and investments. Though he was hardly consistent, he is perhaps best seen as someone who, looking back at his impoverished childhood, identified with the poor and downtrodden, but had no ideas about restructuring or even reforming society. Claims about him being a ‘Communist’ say more about the hysteria prevalent in some circles in the US than about Chaplin himself.  

Paul Bennett

Peter Watkins: A Revolutionary Film-Maker (2015)

Peter Watkins

From the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

To mark the 80^th birthday of film-maker Peter Watkins, we examine his unfairly neglected work.

Peter Watkins, the film auteur, has been subject to massive marginalisation of his work. His entire oeuvre has seemingly met with extreme disapproval by the state, the power structures in capitalism and its ideological support structure, the mass media. Watkins can be a difficult film artist but he is essential cinema, the pioneer of the faux docudrama where he dissects historical events, the present day, or the near future. He described himself as a libertarian socialist and campaigns against false, stale and authoritarian film-making.

In the mid-1970s, Watkins’ experience of film-making and his studies of mainstream cinema and television led him to develop his theory of the ‘Monoform’, the predominant style used by the ‘Mass Audio Visual Media’ (MAVM) industry. A film or programme produced in the Monoform would be edited with a rapid succession of different images which don’t allow the viewer long enough to digest and consider what they have seen. This style manipulates the viewer into interpreting the film according to what the film-makers determine.

This theory influenced how Watkins would make his films. For example, The Journey (1987) did attempt in its use of time, space and alternative structures to counter the Monoform. His later preference for lengthy films gave the viewer more time and information to consider the subject matter, although he recognised that non-monoform movies don’t have to be as long asThe Journey’s14.5 hours! His use of non-professional actors and improvised scenes (even before he developed the theory of the Monoform) were intended to give a voice to people outside the media industry.

His theory of the Monoform includes a discourse about the ‘Universal Clock’ which refers to the synchronisation and the global movement of the televisions in the world, calibrated anywhere, at any time, their programming constructed without meaning, context or feeling but fitting within time constraints determined by commercials.

The Monoform treats audiences as receivers, consumers, passive spectators when faced with news, television and film. People are trained to accept the mass media in a non-critical light as if the media is neutral  and informative. The Monoform precludes any critical analysis of technique, structure, or effect, and is based on pre-formed moulds, from which there is no real freedom. The public are viewed as inherently stupid so that it needs authoritarian, simplistic, rapidly-moving language forms in order to absorb consumer ideas from TV.

To counter the Monoform, Watkins advocates an organic relationship between the film-maker and the audience; using non-professionals furthers his cause of involving the public in a democratic media. Watkins has laid out new possibilities for meaningful audience interaction with media, not just for viewers and those involved in production, but on a personal level. He endeavours to remove the comfortable avoidance of reality inherent in conventional programming on television by challenging the mainstream media’s handle on the way we view the world through television and film. Watkins has wrought more truth from the faux docudrama genre than the documentaries of the so-called vérité school.

Watkins himself pioneered the docudrama genre of dramatising events in the style of newsreel footage, right from the early years of his career. In the mid 1950s, he was part of the Playcraft amateur theatre group in Kent. He acquired an 8mm camera and directed the group in short films set in the first and second world wars, and during the 1956 Hungarian uprising. By the early 1960s, Watkins was working as an assistant producer at the BBC. He had already noticed that ‘much of the commercial cinema in the 1950s and early 1960s, and television in general, felt extremely stilted and conventional, holding the public locked into set and authoritarian agendas’, and he wanted ‘to offer a way of countering the effects of soap-opera historical reconstructions and TV news broadcasts’ (pwatkins.mnsi.net/part2_home.htm). So, when he had the opportunity to produce his own film for the BBC, he built on his newsreel style, and Culloden (1964) was the result.

The film showed the 1746 battle between forces loyal to the Stuart and Hanover royal dynasties, and its aftermath, as if a TV camera crew had been there to record it. In less than an hour, over 2,000 soldiers were killed, and the victorious Hanoverian Duke of Cumberland’s troops then went on to hunt down any remaining members of opposing clans. One of Watkins’ aims was to draw parallels between the resulting destruction of the clan system and the American army’s impact on civilians during the then-current Vietnam War.

Many of the cast were non-professional actors, including descendents of those who fought at Culloden. This wasn’t just an artistic decision in order to elicit more naturalistic performances, but also a political statement. Watkins wanted his films to provide a voice for anyone, rather than the biased, unrepresentative media industry. The film received enthusiastically supportive reviews, especially for its pioneering techniques.

After Culloden, the BBC commissioned Watkins again, and he produced the 1965 harrowing, bleak, nuclear war docudrama The War Game, 47 minutes in length. It concerned a nuclear attack on Britain focusing on the North Kent area, and featured instant flash blindness, a firestorm, radiation sickness, widespread psychological damage and suicide. We see the Army burn corpses, the rationing of resources, police shooting looters during food riots, civil disturbance becomes a capital offence, and people are executed by firing squad. The cast was almost entirely made up of non-actors, and Watkins filmed in the style of a news magazine programme.

The BBC violated their own Charter when in September 1965 they screened the film to senior members of the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Post Office, the Military Chiefs of Staff, and the Secretary to Harold Wilson’s Cabinet. As a result, the BBC suppressed transmission before the screening date in October 1965, stating ‘the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting, it will, however, be shown to invited audiences.’ A Parliamentary question in December 1965 ‘asked the Secretary of State for the Home Department what representations he made to the BBC concerning the Civil Defence film called The War Game; and why he exerted pressure to prevent its showing to the public’. But the Labour government denied any outside pressure on the BBC. There had also been pressure from Equity, the British actors’ union, who were angry that non-professional actors had been used.

The War Game was released to cinema in 1966, and picked up the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and a BAFTA. Hypocritically, the BBC picked up the awards although the BBC had also said the film was banned because it was an artistic failure! Today both The War Game and Culloden have been available for some years on DVD but it is difficult to obtain these films for theatrical screenings which is related to restrictions imposed by Equity. The BBC eventually broadcast The War Game twenty years later in July 1985 during the week before the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.

The film essentially stated that civil defence policies did not prepare the public for a nuclear attack. Watkins said later that ‘I was interested in breaking the illusion of media-produced ‘reality’. My question was ‘Where is ‘reality’?’’ Watkins disassembled the fourth wall to uproot the MAVM complacency, and characters deliver direct Brechtian statements to camera. Patrick Murphy, a senior lecturer in Film and Television at York St John University, quotes Watkins: ‘The War Game and Culloden are signposts to a direction that TV could have taken, but refused. Television could have been a plurality of forms and processes.’ Watkins’ disillusionment with the way television programming was heading meant that he left the BBC and turned instead to film production.

His reputation as a talented new voice meant he could attract the backing of major studios such as Universal Pictures. This led to Privilege (1967), a docudrama about Steven Shorter, a manufactured pop idol of the near future. Shorter’s career is dictated by his management company, which is working with the government to distract his millions of fans from society’s problems. His stage act uses violence to provide ‘the public with a necessary release of all the nervous tension caused by the state of the world’. Shorter’s popularity with the masses means that he can be used to manipulate them. So when the state wants to promote religious and national unity, Shorter is rebranded as repentant and faithful. The singer Paul Jones from Manfred Mann plays Shorter, giving a tense, awkward performance which reflects how the character is trapped and unable to express himself.

Privilege was dismissed by contemporary reviewers as ‘paranoid, hysterical and unconvincing’ (Privilege DVD booklet), and was shown by few cinemas. Consequently, it has been largely forgotten, whereas it should be recognised as a lively and perceptive critique of the mass media’s power, echoing Herbert Marcuse’s views about consumerism as a form of social control. The directions that Watkins’ career would take next reflect his growing awareness of how the media industry stifles intelligent debate. The concluding part of our look at his work will follow in the next issue.

Mike Foster & Steve Clayton

Oil, Regime Change and Refugees (2015)

From the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

In his 1998 book The Common Good, Noam Chomsky makes an important observation: ‘The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate’.

The notion expressed here has been confirmed as the refugees crisis has unfolded. The government and the media have indeed set the parameters of the debate and the majority of people have engaged. Discussion has tended to focus on how many refugees Britain should take, what the relief effort would cost and whether, as the BBC had us considering, these unfortunates are refugees or migrants.

The public have responded empathically, often heroically, with a spontaneous upsurge of heartfelt solidarity, signing petitions, collecting money, taking part in demos and marches, even organising aid convoys to help stranded refugees in Calais. Governments across Europe have reacted accordingly to the outpouring of popular support and, in many cases risibly, with David Cameron, the British PM, for instance, pledging to take 20,000 refugees over the next five years – a mere 10 refugees a day and a figure dwarfed by the number of Britons who will leave their native shores for a better life elsewhere in that period.

The military ‘solution’

There has been a ubiquitous outcry that something must be done to halt this global diaspora and Western governments – Britain's being no exception – have not been slow in interpreting this as a call for further military intervention in Syria where, currently, most refugees are fleeing from.

Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, writing in theDaily Telegraph (30 August), said: ‘I perfectly accept that intervention has not often worked. It has been a disaster in Iraq; it has been a disaster in Libya. But can you honestly say that non-intervention in Syria has been a success? If we keep doing nothing about the nightmare in Syria, then frankly we must brace ourselves for an eternity of refugees, more people suffocating in airless cattle trucks at European motorway service stations, more people trying to climb the barbed wire that we are building around the European Union’.

Former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, writing in the Daily Telegraph (5 September) could ‘not consider it enough to send aid to refugee camps in the Middle East.’ Instead, he called for a military effort to ‘crush’ ISIS in its Syrian heartlands, voicing support for British military intervention to help establish "safe enclaves" within the country where civilians would be shielded from attack by the warring factions in Syria's civil war.

Roger Cohen, an op-ed columnist, writing for the New York Times (10 September), expressed ideas that are becoming common in the US media: ‘American interventionism can have terrible consequences, as the Iraq war has demonstrated. But American non-interventionism can be equally devastating, as Syria illustrates. Not doing something is no less of a decision than doing it’.

And for its part, the Murdoch-controlled media is also supportive of Western military intervention in Syria, perhaps not least because Murdoch is a major shareholder in Genie Energy which has recently been granted rights to explore for oil and gas in the portion of Syria occupied by Israel and known as the Golan Heights.

David Cameron has played his hand close to his chest, wary of forcing another Commons vote on military action in the region after his humiliating defeat two years ago unless, that is, he can be sure of winning the parliamentary consensus needed for airstrikes. With Jeremy Corbyn now facing him on the opposition benches as Labour leader, that support is extremely remote.

Needless to say, it's the same old lie, the same thin veil that has cloaked many a conflict peddled by politicians and their lackeys who count on people suffering massive bouts of historical amnesia at times of crisis – the perennial case for humanitarian intervention and bombs with smiley faces that supposedly kill only bad guys.

The BBC news site reported on 5 September that ‘President Barack Obama has called on Congress to authorise US military action in Syria. The move has provoked sharp, multifaceted debate in the US Capitol as a resolution moves through the legislative process’.

And of that resolution, the Guardian reported (6 September): ‘... Barack Obama for the first time portrayed his plans for US military action [in Syria] as part of a broader strategy to topple [Syrian President] Bashar al-Assad, as the White House's campaign to win over sceptics in Congress gained momentum’.

Ostensibly, the resolution would allow a 90-day window for a US military attack in Syria, where both ISIS and the Syrian government would be targeted and with regime change in Syria the ultimate objective.

Western political pundits would have it that their respective governments are not doing enough to solve the crisis in Syria and the resulting and ongoing chaos. This helps to mask just what they have done to create the crisis. In recent years, for instance, the Obama administration has engaged in crippling Syria with sanctions, provided air support for those keen to overthrow Assad and in direct violation of international law, inadvertently, and perhaps purposely, armed ISIS, and all but merged the CIA-bankrolled Free Syrian Army with Al Qaeda.

Supporting the anti-Assad forces, every bit as reactionary as the regime they are keen to overthrow, has cost the CIA over $1 billion and US officials concede that they have trained 10,000 of these jihadist fighters. The maths speak for themselves – $100,000 to train each fighter.

Changing regimes

Syria and Iran have long been in Washington's crosshairs. Back in October of 2007, General Wesley Clark gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in which he revealed the gist of a memo from the Office of the US Secretary of Defense, weeks after 9/11, and US plans to ‘attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years,’ commencing with Iraq and moving on to ‘Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and finally Iran’. Clark argued that this strategy is fundamentally about control of the region’s vast oil and gas resources (see also: Real Men Want to go to Iran, Socialist Standard, March 2006).

Again in 2007, in a New Yorker article entitled ‘The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefiting our enemies in the war on terrorism?’, Seymour Hersh wrote: ‘To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East ... The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.’

In 2008, the US Army-funded RAND report, Unfolding the Future of the Long War, noted that ‘the economies of the industrialised states will continue to rely heavily on oil, thus making it a strategically important resource.’ Thus, with most oil being produced by the Middle East, Washington has ‘motive for maintaining stability in and good relations with Middle Eastern states’.

The report goes on:

‘The geographic area of proven oil reserves coincides with the power base of much of the Salafi-jihadist network. This creates a linkage between oil supplies and the long war that is not easily broken or simply characterised... For the foreseeable future, world oil production growth and total output will be dominated by Persian Gulf resources... The region will therefore remain a strategic priority, and this priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war’.

In August 2009 – and notably the year in which Britain covertly began to make plans to train anti-Assad rebels – it was announced that US-friendly Qatar was intent on running a pipeline through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey, and with a view to supply the European market and in blatant competition with Russia. Assad was having none of it and refused to sign any agreement – his allegiance was with Russia. Conversely, Assad had other plans that could only enrage Washington – proposals for an alternative $10 billion pipeline plan with neighbouring Iran, crossing Iraq and into Syria that would also, it was hoped, allow Iran to supply gas to Europe direct. Assad was overstepping the mark, not playing by Washington's rules and his removal had become a necessity.

It is not just coincidence that those countries with major oil and gas deposits, or strategically placed so the same can be easily accessed, suffer the greatest instability and are producing the greatest number of refugees. Cameron's 'moral responsibility' to refugees pales into insignificance when one considers the real agenda – Britain's part in Washington's plan for regime change in Syria. And this is where Cameron’s personal 'responsibility' really lies – not with ordinary people, in their hundreds and thousands, compelled to flee war zones that his government had a hand in creating but with removing Assad, in order for instance to run a pipeline through Syrian territory and to prevent Iran and Russia gaining strategic momentum in the region.

Meanwhile, Russia – its overtures to seek peace talks with all factions in Syria rebuffed by Washington – has moved to strengthen the Assad government against ISIS and al-Qaeda backed rebels. In response, the White House issued a stern warning to Russia and pressured neighbouring governments, like Bulgaria, to deny Russia access to their air space in an attempt to block Russia's transportation of weapons to aid the Syrian government forces.

Critics warn that in moving to prevent Russian weapons reaching the Syrian government, Obama is strengthening those forces fighting to overthrow Assad and that if Obama wins a mandate for his new war and topples the Syrian president, these rebel groups are the ones who will fill the power vacuum. The logic suggests that overthrowing President Assad would in all probability create a radical jihadist state in Damascus, every bit as repressive as the current regime, and lead to massacres and floods of people fleeing reprisals – Syrian Christians, Alawites and Druze – ensuring the further destabilisation of the region. Thus, millions more refugees will sweep into neighbouring countries and Europe, that is if they survive the vengeance of the new Syrian rulers.

The price paid

US intervention under the guise of humanitarian objectives is not about stabilising the world's trouble spots and alleviating human misery. The most cursory reading of US foreign policy since 1945 suggests the exact opposite. It destabilises one country after another on behalf of its corporate elite and its military-industrial complex and in furtherance of what has often been referred to as full spectrum dominance, and to hell with the loss of life. Consider, for instance, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when confronted in an interview with the heinous fact that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US sanctions. Her reply: ‘It was a price worth paying’.

For the US and its lackeys in Downing Street, the refugee crisis is perhaps a price worth paying, especially if the spin-off is consolidating their power in a region of the world rich in mineral resources and controlling who does and does not get access to them. The British government's real commitment can further be witnessed at the DSEI Arms Fair in London last month where some 1500 stall holders aimed to sell their wares to some of the most authoritarian, brutal and repressive regimes on Earth.

Solidarity

In the meantime, the real clamour to help refugees is not coming from Western governments, but ordinary people from all walks of life, organising as best they can, in their groups, communities, and often as individuals. For socialists, it is reassuring that so many workers across Europe refuse to see those they are rallying to support as anything other than human beings, homeless, frightened, displaced, and have refused to see them as migrants, illegal immigrants, refugees, Syrian, Libyan, Moslem, black or any of the other categories into which our species is labelled and pigeonholed. We can only hope this solidarity grows into a revolutionary class consciousness – when these same workers demand the eradication of borders and frontiers and every other artificial boundary that divides us, realising that same solidarity can help us fashion a world in our own interests if taken a step further.

John Bissett

TTIP: Putting Profits Before People (2015)

From the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) is a free trade and investment treaty  being negotiated in secret between the European Union and the USA. The main goal of TTIP is to remove regulatory barriers which restrict the potential profits to be made by transnational corporations on both sides of the Atlantic.

The British government claims TTIP could add £10bn to the UK economy, $80bn to the US and €100bn to the EU every year. It says consumers would benefit by the removal of EU import tariffs. And reducing regulation would help UK small businesses export to the US. Tariffs between the EU and US are already low, averaging around 3 percent but both sides foresee they will be eliminated under the agreement. The main focus of negotiations is on harmonising regulations, reducing 'non-tariff barriers' to trade, or abolishing them if they're deemed unnecessary. US and EU regulators have different requirements for testing the safety of products. Going through the different tests is expensive for business but TTIP aims to reduce those costs by bringing in common standards.

TTIP is championed by the capitalist class. Cameron has described it as 'the biggest bilateral trade deal in history' (Guardian 17 June 2013). John Cridland of the CBI added 'with the UK already trading more and investing more with the US than any other country, there are real advantages to drive home particularly for smaller firms. TTIP would be the biggest free trade deal ever negotiated' (CBI News 18 December 2014).

Godfrey Bloom, the ex-UKIP MEP commented:

'For the conviction Free Trader, the international classical liberal TTIP is very natural progression in a global society especially between two great trading blocks the USA and the EU. It begs the expectation of such supporters of 19th Century advocates such as Frederick Bastiat that 'when trade crosses borders armies do not'. A qualified welcome therefore from such idealists was fairly immediate, rightly so. One might carry forward Bastiat's theory to fit with more pressing international concerns such as migratory refugees: 'when trade crosses borders migrants don't'. Liberal societies with free trade agreements prosper.'

Bloom concluded 'the theory of TTIP is noble and worthwhile but in practice is doomed to failure. Does anybody imagine for a moment the regulators both sides of the Atlantic will not protect their turf, that they will voluntarily give ground, that big business in the world of crony capitalism really want to see increased competition from small and medium sized businesses?' (Huffington Post UK 11 June).

Trade and investment deals

The EU has been negotiating a similar trade and investment deal with Canada, known as the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA). One of Canada’s key negotiating aims was to promote the use in Europe of oil from its tar sands. In 2012, the EU’s Fuel Quality Directive (FQD) proposed that oil from tar sands should be given a 20 percent higher carbon value than conventional oil. This reflected the greater pollution caused by its production and was designed to steer companies away from using it in the EU. However, a few weeks after CETA was concluded, the final version of the FQD had been watered down, and lacked the earlier requirement that companies needed to account for the higher emissions from tar sands, effectively neutering it.

Another free trade agreement is the Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) which would further consolidate transnational corporate power. TISA covers 52 countries including the EU, North America, some South American nations, Japan, Israel, Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan. It is set to affect up to 70 percent of the global services economy. It includes the removal of restriction on moving 'natural persons' from one country to another which will mean the capitalist class can use migrant workers to drive down wages and conditions. For some countries their only 'comparative advantage' is cheap labour. TISA would allow multinational corporations to exploit migrant workers with impunity.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is considered by the US as the companion agreement to TTIP.  This agreement covers the US, Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Canada and Japan. TPP is one of the primary goals of the trade agenda of the Obama administration in the US.

Right to sue governments

TTIP also consolidates the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) which gives transnational corporations the right to challenge a country's laws. ISDS allows transnational corporations to receive compensation for the absence of a 'predictable regulatory environment.' Already under existing WTO free-trade rules this type of argument has been used to attack clean energy, mining, land use, health, and labour rights. More than $14 billion in 16 claims are now under litigation in the US. Under TTIP, a transnational corporation could sue a Government if their profits might be affected by food safety standards or wage increases. ISDS creates a parallel legal system, independent of national law, allowing transnational corporations to sue governments in secret corporate courts over laws or regulations that might prevent or reduce profit, what they term 'indirect appropriation.'

In 2012, the government of Ecuador decided to terminate its contract with US oil corporation Occidental, after Occidental sold 40 percent of its production rights to another company without abiding by its legal obligation to obtain government approval. Occidental turned to the ISDS provision in the US-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty. This allows companies to sue governments through international courts for policies that threaten their profits. Occidental won and, as a result, Ecuador was forced to pay out $1.77 billion to Occidental, the highest compensation awarded to an investor through ISDS to date.

The government of Slovakia moved to restrict the powers of private insurance firms in the public health system which led to a number of health insurance companies successfully suing the Slovak government for their loss of profits. The Dutch firm Achmea attempted to use the same powers to block the Slovak government from setting up a public insurance scheme that would provide health cover to all the country's citizens. Achmea lost but because the scheme had not yet been adopted. If it is, no doubt they will try again.

The Vattenfall Corporation, a Swedish energy company is using an ISDS clause in an energy treaty to sue the German government for €4.7 billion following its decision to close its nuclear power stations in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. This case has not yet been decided.  Corporations don’t win every time but merely suing is an attempt to stop governments acting. As TUC General Secretary, Frances O’Grady has pointed out, it represents the spread of ‘compensation culture’ to the international level. Addressing the European Commission Trade Policy Day in Brussels in June, she said that ISDS identifies 'the compensation culture that is building up in multinational companies, where suing democratically elected governments becomes more remunerative than actually providing a service' (TUC, 23 June).

Screening regulatory measures

All new US or EU proposals for legislation or regulation would have to be screened first for their impacts on trade and business. 'Mutual recognition' means that the EU would recognise US standards as 'legitimate' and would therefore allow US exports into the EU even when they don't meet EU standards.  TTIP is not to stimulate trade through removing tariffs between the EU and USA, as these are already at minimal level. The main goal of TTIP is to remove regulatory 'barriers' which restrict potential profits to be made by transnational corporations. The EU has much stricter regulations on GM crops, pesticides, food safety, and the environment than the US. TTIP deal could open the EU market to cheaper products with poorer standards such as hormone-fed beef rinsed in acid, genetically modified oil from pesticide-soaked crops, and butter laced with antibiotics. In the EU, the precautionary principle is paramount to policy-making, meaning that a business must prove to government that a product poses no threat to human health or the environment. In the USA, a product is presumed safe, and for it to be banned government must prove that there is a threat to human health or the environment.

If global temperature rise is to be kept below 2 degrees and the most severe impacts of climate change mitigated, around 80 percent of known fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground. The EU is pursuing a trade deal that would undoubtedly lead to even more money being poured into fossil fuel extraction. One of the key aims of TTIP is to push the US to reduce or remove current restrictions on the export of crude oil and shale gas.  This would facilitate the export of tar sand oil, mined in Canada and refined/transported via the US. A EU 2014 report by the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate confirmed that high-carbon investment over the next 15 years will only serve to lock in the risks of dangerous climate change.

TTIP would allow private firms running NHS services to sue the government. The NHS is a 'public service' (the 1993 General Agreement on Trade in Services Treaty defines a 'public service' as one supplied 'neither on a commercial basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers') but as a result of the 2013 Health and Social Care Act, more health services in the UK are being put out to tender in a competitive market by Clinical Commissioning Groups. This commercial competitive element means that large parts of the NHS will not be protected from TTIP.

Unemployment

The EU has admitted that TTIP will probably cause unemployment as jobs switch to the US, where labour standards and trade union rights are lower. Examples from other similar bi-lateral trade agreements around the world support the case for job losses. The Economic Policy Institute in Washington DC estimates that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico caused the loss of a million US jobs and shrinking real-terms wages for millions more workers. The Centre for Economic Policy Research concluded in a study commissioned by the European Commission itself that TTIP could cause between 680,000 and 1.3 million job losses in Europe and between 325,000 and 715,000 jobs in the US.

The US also has lower labour standards and employment rights than EU countries. The US has not ratified a number of the most important International Labour Organisation Conventions, including the rights to freedom of association and collective bargaining. The US has also passed Right to Work legislation in 24 states, most recently in the traditional union stronghold of Michigan, which clamp down on unions capacity to bargain and organise. European companies may take advantage of the ease of market access created by TTIP to relocate to the USA, and take advantage of the weak labour regulations. There is also the possibility that American companies may be encouraged by TTIP to relocate to EU states such as Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia where incomes are low and trade unions are weaker than in other parts of the EU.

For transnational corporations, barriers to trade are things that restrict their profits such as labour rights, food safety rules, regulations on the use of toxic chemicals, the minimum wage, health and safety laws, and environmental regulations. TTIP is a charter for profit before people. The casualties will be working class people the world over, who will end up as collateral damage, more powerless and more vulnerable than ever in the face of global capitalism. TTIP is a race to the bottom, to the lowest common denominator that will further the interests of global capitalism.

Marx in his Speech on the Question of Free Trade in Brussels in January 1848 pointed out that 'when you have torn down the few national barriers which still restrict the free development of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action... every one of the destructive phenomena to which unlimited competition gives rise within any one nation is reproduced in more gigantic proportions in the market of the world.' He concluded 'the Free Trade system works destructively. It breaks up old nationalities and carries antagonism of proletariat and bourgeoisie to the uttermost point. In a word, the Free Trade system hastens the Social Revolution. In this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, I am in favour of Free Trade.'

Steve Clayton

News From India (2015)

From the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter sent to the Calcutta paper The Statesman.

In the evening of August 23 in the Sunday Discussion Meeting of our party, the World Socialist Party (India), we read with interest the Saturday Statesman, August 22, article ‘Relevance of Marx’ written by Professor Gargi Sengupta (see here). It is really heartening to note that a nineteenth century communist revolutionary, Karl Marx, is being revisited by the 21st century mainstream press to find answers to the present-day woes and worries. Hopefully, this signals the beginning of Marx’s media-ride in India too.

This happens because, as Marx and Engels themselves observed, ‘consciousness can sometimes appear further advanced than the contemporary empirical conditions, so that in the struggles of a later epoch one can refer to earlier theoreticians as authorities’ (The German Ideology). ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’ wrote Marx in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

In her appreciation in defence of Marx, Gargi Sengupta has rightly claimed that ‘Marxism enables us to understand the nature of the capitalist crisis,’ and also that ‘Marx believed that human development requires a cooperative society based on common ownership of the means of production.’

She has excellently pronounced, ‘The overall significance of religion may have declined, but the family, the schools, and the capitalist controlled mass media continue to brainwash the working class and prevent them from realizing their true destiny’.

Her observation: ‘From a global perspective, a class-based analysis is still relevant,’ holds up one of the basic principles of Marxism. She defends Marx for ‘making a very fundamental contribution’ whereby ‘He placed human beings and their conscious, purposive activity – human labour – at the centre of his analysis’ and also for a ‘unique contribution’ – the role of ‘class struggle’ in ‘human historical development’. She is right in pointing out that ‘Marx’s writings still evoke interest across the world. … Marx’s writings can throw light on the problems of our age’. Simply because, as Marx viewed, ‘The nature of capital remains the same in its developed as in its undeveloped form’; and ‘Production of surplus value is the absolute law of this mode of production’(Capital, Volume I).

Actually, Marx is more relevant today than ever before.

This said, I would like to comment on a couple of inaccuracies in Professor Sengupta's article. She says, ’Marx visualized the remedy in violent revolution followed by decades of civil and international warfare.’ This is a half-truth. True, in his early years Marx held a ’violent revolution’ view. However, eventually and finally he arrived at the following conclusion: ‘Proletariat – organized in a separate political party. That such organization must be pursued by all the means which the proletariat has at its disposal, including universal suffrage, thus transformed from the instrument of trickery, which it has been up till now into an instrument of emancipation’ (written on about May 10, 1880, printed according to L'Egalité, no. 24, June 30, 1880, checked with the text of Le Précurseur).

Secondly, in portraying capitalism as only a ‘private enterprise’ system she has missed the yardstick of defining state capitalism – the defining characteristic of which is state ownership and control of the means of production and articles for distribution. As a result she is mistaken in recognizing the erstwhile so-called ‘communist’ dictatorial and despotic state capitalist regimes of Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. How could there be ‘the eclipse of communism’ when communism (socialism the same) has nowhere and never been attempted at all? Just what happened in these countries was appropriately described in 1918 by Fitzgerald of the Socialist Party of Great Britain: ‘What justification is there, then, for terming the upheaval in Russia a Socialist Revolution? None whatever beyond the fact that the leaders in the November movement claim to be Marxian Socialists’ (Socialist Standard, August 1918).

Binay Sarkar

The book on the film (2015)

Book Review from the October 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

'Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies', by Dave Itzkoff (Times Books, 2014)

In 1976, MGM released Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, a film that would change the way people saw television. It tells the story of Howard Beale, the distinguished senior anchorman of a major American network, who suffers an on-air breakdown. ‘I’m going to blow my brains out right on this program a week from today,’ he announces, explaining that he ‘just ran out of bullshit’ to broadcast. The network executives are horrified and plan on firing him, but after seeing the effect his rants had on the show’s ratings, decide to keep him on. An increasingly inflamed Beale abandons all pretence of objectivity and uses his top-rated show to whip millions into a frenzy over the injustices he sees in society. Impressed, the network commissions a slate of new programmes showcasing violent crime, terrorism, political extremism, and paranoid prophecies of doom—all with the sole purpose of channelling viewers’ fear and outrage into market share and advertising revenue.

Network caused a sensation when it was released. It was loudly denounced by television journalists, who saw it as an unconscionable attack on the nobility of their profession, but it went on to sweep the Academy Awards with a record-setting ten nominations and four wins. Despite this, the film is virtually unknown to today’s audiences—and when it is shown at all, viewers take it as a straight-up drama rather than the sly but radical comedy it was written and received as in the 1970s. As contemporary screenwriter Aaron Sorkin aptly put it, ‘No predictor of the future—not even Orwell—has ever been as right as Chayefsky was when he wrote Network.’

In Mad as Hell, Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times recounts the curious story of how a film as anti-establishment as Network ever made it to the big screen. In Itzkoff’s analysis, thatNetwork got produced at all may well have been a happy historical accident: MGM had found themselves missing out on the counterculture wave that was sweeping Hollywood, and so, desperate for a box office hit of their own, acceded to veteran screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky’s demands for total creative control over his next film. Chayefsky used this highly unusual grant of authority—which exceeded even that of the film’s director—to ensure that his dystopian world was faithfully translated from screenplay to film. That Network so pointedly attacked the medium of television was of no concern to the studio, which at the time had no relationship to any television networks apart from the occasional sale of broadcasting rights for their films. Whether MGM would have produced such a film today is another matter entirely. ‘In an age when all the major broadcast networks are now either owned by or affiliated with a motion picture and entertainment conglomerate,’ observes Itzkoff, ‘it is hard to imagine a studio turning its guns on itself the same way.’

Mad as Hell faithfully documents Network’s entire production process, from early drafts of the screenplay up to postproduction and pre-release marketing, and goes on to recount and analyze the controversy and critical acclaim the film garnered upon its release. Of greatest interest, however, is the book’s final chapter, which discusses how Chayefsky’s nightmarish vision of a world that has eroded away the distinction between information and entertainment has finally come to pass. Itzkoff attributes this to a significant relaxation in antitrust laws and federally mandated broadcasting standards, coupled with a proliferation of cable TV channels. While journalism has never been truly objective, before 1987 US broadcasters were at least nominally required to be honest and to provide contrasting views. Itzkoff explains how ‘informational’ television today is dominated by shallow, tabloid-style programming, making good use of interviews with veteran newsmen who have variously resisted and embraced the new regime.

Itzkoff is equally astute at identifying the film’s enduring contribution to popular political discourse. Though neither Paddy Chayefsky nor his mouthpiece Howard Beale are socialists, they are both acutely aware of the ills of global capitalism and of the urgent necessity of the population at large taking some sort of radical, corrective action. (‘We are right now living in what has to be called a corporate society, a corporate world, a corporate universe,’ laments Beale at one point in the film. ‘This world quite simply is a vast cosmology of small corporations orbiting around larger corporations who, in turn, revolve around giant corporations, and this whole, endless, ultimate cosmology is expressly designed for the production and consumption of useless things.’) Network, Itzkoff concludes, was all about ‘awakening its viewers to ugly and unflattering truths about their lives and the world they inhabited, and it did not communicate its messages in a subtle or soft-spoken manner: it put its most urgent and passionate ideas in the mouth of a man who at times is literally screaming them at his audience, commanding them to go to their windows and scream their dissatisfaction themselves.’ Indeed, what sets Beale apart from his countless successors—both in the film and in real life—are his perceptiveness and sincerity. He proclaims himself to be ‘mad as hell’, but he is not deranged; he is lucid and insightful, and his anger is no mere shtick. The real tragedy of Beale—and of Chayefsky—may be that they failed to offer their enraptured viewers any real solution to the problems they so effectively articulated.

Tristan Miller