Hardcore for Nerds

Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever (‘Tubby’s Ghost’)

Another brilliant passage which calls back to this one. My heart sank a little reading it at first, because ‘white American journalist using Jamaican political violence to make philosophical point’ is not usually a good look, but he kinda pulls it off here? This is where I can see the political speechwriter history coming through - maybe if he’d worked for Michael Manley things would have been happier (that’s if you believe in the power of rhetoric to subvert structural politics, which in the post-Obamania age is a tough bet). That’s what I like so much about the book - jumping through history to tell breezy anecdotes can be such a hokey element of these kind of ‘popular’ science/culture books, but he seems to nearly always do it well. Here it’s the story of how Tubby “began the Pro Tooling of the world by turning his tiny studio into a musical instrument”.

The image, however, directly contradicts an even more powerful one from the end of Camus’ 1951 The Rebel, his essay on existentialism, and a humanity torn between warring totalitarianisms:

“Each tells the other he is not God; this is the end of romanticism. At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its adolescent rages. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is inflexible and free.”

‘Complete control’ is as the 20th century demonstrated a political impossibility, and dangerous to attempt (the 21st century suggests increasing control by, or of, the individual, depending on one’s view of technology; and an accelerating lack of control at the environmental level). But Perfecting Sound Forever is patently not about the ‘end of the romanticism’: it is the continuation of it, such as with the mystique of analogue sound in which Milner indulges fairly heavily, and it is admittedly a rather petit-bourgeois romanticism. We will listen to our sonic experiments encoded onto petroleum and/or transmitted through electricity and plastic, while the world burns and others starve, but we shall be free? Or can we transmute our adolescent rages into art with revolutionary potential, become the arrow of self-determination and not the targeted consumer?

Iceland, Fervent Prosecutor of Bankers, Sees Meager Returns

Don’t you love those stilted NYT headlines? And the ‘light sentence’ was nine months in prison, with six suspended - substantial indeed from the current Irish perspective. Yet I’m suspicious about the value of pursuing white-collar crime like this outside of its benefit to ‘cleaning up’ the banking industry - which should really mean addressing the massive deregulation of capital and financial services in past decades - and natural justice as it relates to the criminal system. I’m far more sceptical about the usefulness of exemplary justice in its own right - the US, with its famed ‘perp walk’, was after all the site of the financial excess and dodgy dealings which precipitated the whole global crisis. 

As for Iceland’s broader response, the article has this to say:

“After the crash, the new government pushed to restructure the failed banks, purging their former management and owners and prodding them to write off a big chunk of their loans to homeowners burdened with big mortgages. The government declined to bail out foreign bondholders, who lost about $85 billion. Iceland now has a growing economy.

But it is not entirely clear that Iceland deserves its reputation as a warrior against Wall Street orthodoxy. In time, Iceland won praise from the International Monetary Fund for sharp cuts in spending and tax increases that slashed the government’s deficit and helped put the country back on an even keel.”

Ireland’s problem is clearly that we have taken the second set of measures (problematic in themselves) without also taking the first. The post-austerity boat remains firmly underwater with all the public debt the banks have caused us to take on, and even the national orthodoxy struggles to deny it. It’s become an article of faith that we can’t ‘decline to bail out foreign bondholders’, although there’s little discussion of what the consequences would be - the identities of the bondholders remain largely secret - and the ultimate obstacle is probably the unwillingness of our European partners to pursue that route any further than they already have with Greece. I don’t think it would be a panacea either, and I have suspicions about what the real Icelandic economic experience was like (I heard a lot of people had to take to the earlier industry of fishing, which seems uncomfortable if true), or if it’s even been long enough to tell.

Yet jailing a few bankers (in an overcrowded prison system) won’t solve many problems either, and I think it disguises some of the real ones:

“Mr. Sigfusson, the minister of industry, said he was regularly invited to speak on how Iceland dealt with its banking crisis. Iceland, he said, has “no magic solution” but has managed to push through unpopular cuts in spending in part because it managed to curb public anger by pushing for the prosecution of its bankers.”

Again, Ireland has made such cuts without taking the same measures to ‘curb public anger’ (limited anyway because, possibly, of a kind of national passivity). But how many of the cuts are really necessary, and how many are a cover for the reduction in state services and the privatisation of its resources and activities? “It is important to reiterate that the fiscal deficits in the European countries, including Britain, are largely due to the fall in tax revenues following the finance-induced recession, rather than to the rise in welfare spending” (And particularly in the Irish case, welfare spending has risen in the recession because of increased unemployment, driven in part by public sector reductions)

The ‘public anger’ that is there is often expressed as being about the unfairness that the ordinary citizen has to suffer for the misdemeanours of the banking classes, but it doesn’t follow that the only or correct solution is to make a few convicted wrongdoers ‘suffer’ judicially, when it relies on the premise that the economic suffering in general is necessary or that it is fairly distributed amongst the public and the wealth of  ordinary citizens. By all means lock up the bankers (or liquidate the kulaks, or whatever) but they’re only part of the problem. The larger issue is, of course, capitalism, and how to fashion a humanist response to it.

Europe is haunted by the myth of the lazy mob - The Guardian

They really should have kept the ‘spectre’ in the title, even if the point of the article is that it’s a far more constructed image. In itself there’s not a whole lot of meat to the article - plenty to think about in a general way, nevertheless - but looking through the list of previous pieces by the author, Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang, I’m surprised I’m not as familiar with the name. They all feature the kind of critical, sensible points that were seemingly driven out of the discussion on the economic crisis, right from the start (like a UK-based Paul Krugman, except without the slavish devotion to two-party politics and the sin of repetition). The question has to be - why is that so?

Plenty of people - our own President included - are fond of pointing to the dominance of monetarism, then neo-liberalism, from the 1980s onward as a great shift in politics and economics. But to me that has always lacked the (convincing, and sufficiently profound) historical explanation of a proximate cause. What went wrong, for example, in the 1970s? Was it the decade that Keynesianism ‘broke’, when industrial disputes threatened to tear the social fabric apart - or were they simply symptoms of the chronic unsustainability of capitalism*? That latter answer could have the consequence of pushing one firmer into a harder Marxist camp, discredited by the failures of Communism and the ‘successes’ of capitalism, but that may well have to be the case. (Incidentally, if anyone has any recommendations of history books that would help answer that specific question, I’d be glad of ‘em)

Add in the external factor of oil crises - which we face as an even greater threat in the form of climate change and scarcity - and it seems imperative that our political age challenge those underlying falsities in our social and economic model. Not to just (although it is important and useful) to expose the hypocrisies and - as they appear - ulterior motives of neoliberal politics,  but to expose the alternative for what it is or may be.

*I just finished reading the economic section of Diarmuid Ferriter’s Ambiguous Republic: Ireland in the 1970s - albeit not an author I would look to for a particularly left-wing perspective, as opposed to one merely critical of social and religious authority - and it was the most depressing part of the book yet. Many of the debates over taxation and spending had resonance for today; the questions of industrial relations and incomes brought out the unspoken notion that inequality will always create tensions, and why shouldn’t it? One curious statistic, not particularly well sourced, was that the level of ‘man-days’ lost to industrial action was considerably lower in Ireland in one particular year in the 1970s than it was in the US, and lower again in France. Was that the incipient trend of neoliberalism asserting itself, and finding its reaction? 

Youth unemployment: the remedies - Dan O’Brien - The Irish Times

However you spin that regards education (I think we’re happy expecting that probably most 15-24 year olds would be in education, full-time - I didn’t finish my primary degree until age 22, my master’s at 23; the problem has been after that point) it’s a large drop, covered in part by emigration. The next sentence I don’t wholly agree with, though:

“When you consider that the number of over-45s at work has hardly been affected by the recession, it is surprising that issues of intergenerational equity have not come to the fore.”

Partly because it’s answered later in the same article, although he doesn’t seem to realise it:

“While longer spells in education probably account for most of the young people who are not in the workforce, it is very likely that more under-25s who are neither at work, on the dole or in education are depending on their parents.”

Almost literally it’s ‘don’t bite the hand that feeds you’, since most people in their early 20s are likely to have parents in the over-45 age group; it’s the parents paycheques and pensions which stretch to providing an unofficial support and safety net. So while there are definite issues about entry to public sector jobs and unequal conditions between new and existing workers, it’s a mistake to suggest that the young don’t also benefit from the old hanging on to their incomes. Yes, we’d like the opportunity for more independence, but not as cover for pursuing an ideological agenda against public sector pay, thank you very much.

‘Intergenerational (in)equity’ is I think in many respects a weaker force than intergenerational solidarity, and to suggest otherwise implies a lot of arguments at family dinners. Instead the major force at work in Irish economics is, as always, more of an ‘intersectional inequality’, between those (young or old) on higher incomes, with better opportunities and resources, and those on lower incomes without. Wealth is already redistributed within families - that is essentially their purpose, to provide for the next generation - and what is needed is greater redistribution between families, i.e. across society, the social family mediated by the state. It’s ironic that conservatism, so traditionally supportive of ‘the family’, is now in hock to a neoliberalism which seeks to drive it apart by reducing its members to simple individuals, a radical anti-patriarchy that sees the destruction of unionised working gains as a solution to the poverty of youth, rather than as removing a crucial backstop against the tidal wave of failure created by capitalism.