Snow Days and Dog Days

The Internet and modern communications are wonderful things. They are also absolutely awful things. On the one hand they allow instantaneous communication, and distribution of ideas on a global scale, which fifty years ago would hardly have been conceivable outside science fiction. They enable 24 hour news coverage of events as they happen. On the other hand in a world of instant gratification, of the glorification of superficiality they not only to act to dumb down ideas, but to spread like a game of Chinese Whispers not only those dumbed down ideas, but also totally duff information, which as everyone then quotes by hyperlink what everyone else has said, then becomes raised up as undeniable truth. And in such a world where 24 hour news channels, compete with 24 hour online news media for the quick soundbite to grab their audience share within 20 seconds, before the audience, whose attention span now extends little beyond that, flicks to a different channel, looks back to their PC screen, iPod, or other mobile device, they have to present some startling new headline.

The hyperbole used over the current financial and economic situation is a perfect example.

The 24 hour news channels are perhaps the best examples, because the contrast between the headline and the news content is so starkly contrasted. I’ve noticed over recent years that frequently these headlines are presented as “The worst this”, or the “The best that”, or the “The most severe the other”, “since whenever”. It has to be presented that way, because otherwise in the kind of world described above it isn’t news, the punters move on. Yet, when the details are given often you find that “The worst, best, most severe”, or whatever is only since some fairly recent date. That’s true either in fairly open or stark terms, that is they will actually say “This is the biggest fall in house prices since 1990”, say or else its not said, and you have to dig for the facts. For example I’ve seen things like “This is the biggest drop in the index in history”. If its for share prices let’s say that sounds catastrophic because everyone knows don’t they that shares have been traded for a very long time. The trouble is that the particular index that they are referring to of those shares might be only 10 or 20 years old, so the biggest fall in its history turns out not to be as catastrophic as it was made out to be.

Of course, and this is the other point about all this, if you are only 20 or 30 years old, an index that is itself 20 years old IS ancient history, even though in real economic terms it is meaningless. This is where the other side of the coin comes in, because this misleading and superficial data is picked up, chewed over, and churned out often by many people who are only 20 or 30 years old, and for whom therefore, this data is meaningful, because for them it is historical data. Parenthetically, I am always amused by the TV Programmes, or radio programmes that describe as “classic oldies” music that is barely ten years old. The problem with that is that when combined with existing preconceived notions it can be mixed together in a noxious soup, which is read by others on the net, and again taken for good coin, and from which a whole series of other conclusions and mistaken ideas are spawned. Its like the 45 minutes information over Iraq. It was based on no solid intelligence whatsoever, but one countries intelligence agency talks about, that information is picked up by another agency who use the first agency as their source, its then picked up by other agencies who use both as their sources, until it gets back to the first agency who now see all those other agencies as confirming the unconfirmed information that began the whole charade. All of them believe what they are hearing, believe it is confirmed, because it confirms the preconceived notions they all began with anyway!

Take one discussion I was having recently on the Permanent Revolution website about the current crisis. See: Long Wave of Stagnation . One contributor, Vingelis, like many on the Left over the last 100 years has a set of preconceived notions about Capitalism. He seeks to confirm those notions, and seeks out data to do so. Again like many on the Left over that period he has a number of ideas which have their roots in the bowdlerisation of Marxism by Stalinism, but which have over the decades even been taken up by the Trotskyist Left, notions such as the idea of some catastrophic collapse of Capitalism, or its absolute immiseration of the working class – that is its inability to raise workers living standards. So again like many on the left who see these features as some kind of shortcut to socialism, because after all if workers become poor enough, if capitalism collapses, their fantasies of some repeat of 1917 will come true won’t they, because the workers “must”, as Vingelis put it, take action.

So, that is how our discussion started with Vingelis boldly asserting that this crisis was the death knell of Capitalism, it was in a spiral from which it could not escape! Unfortunately, I’m old enough to have heard it all before as I pointed out. In the early 1980’s when the economic crisis was much worse than it is today the same apocalyptic statements were being made by comrades from the SWP I worked with. But, as I told them then there is no such thing as a crisis from which Capitalism cannot escape, so long as it is able to throw the burden of that crisis on to the working class. And the fact, that the long series of crises that ran from the mid 1970’s to the late 1990’s DID come to an end, that even during that period there WERE periods of even rapid growth, demonstrates the correctness of that statement.

The trouble is that often the people who DO make up the revolutionary sects ARE young people, and so their own personal experience is limited. That’s not their fault, its just a fact, and was as true of me at that time. But, when you are young, time is completely different than when you are older. When you are young everything seems like a historic situation, and consequently you believe that truly historic changes are only a matter of days or months away. In truly revolutionary situations that is good, because it provides the kind of revolutionary energy that is absolutely necessary for the success of the revolution. Outside such situations it is incredibly bad, because it leads to rash decisions, to adventurism and to a failure to do the necessary groundwork within the labour movement that is necessary to create those revolutionary situations, or to enable them to be successfully utilised. The fact that over recent decades these sects have focussed their attention – because it is much easier to attract new members – on students, has exacerbated that tendency, because the whole culture of the student milieu removed from the actual class struggle, removed from the discipline of the workplace and the grounding in reality it provides, can only enhance those millenarian impulses.

If we go back to Vingelis we see the consequences of all this. Time after time he has come out with rash, unsubstantiated statements about this capitalist collapse, about how living standards are lower now than they were even in 1983, or even 1973! Take just one example, he spoke of “Sheffield steel workers in 1983 earning £500 a week”!! Now, if you are young, and you only have as a reference wages of recent years, that might not seem as absurd a claim to you as it really is. Nor even the follow up to that statement he gave when I challenged it, that he knew from “personal experience” that in 1983 sweat shop workers were earning £300 a week, and £450 a week with overtime. As I said, if you only have the experience of recent wages to go by that might seem not out of the ordinary, you might pick up this information and run with it, copy it through the Internet Universe.

What is the reality? The reality is that possibly there was a steel worker in Sheffield in 1983, who earned £500 a week. Possibly there was a sweatshop worker who earned £450 a week during that time. But, I would very much like to see an authenticated copy of their P60’s to prove it, because it is so out of line with what real wages were at that time as to be beyond the realms of reason. For clarity let me give my own wages during that period. IN 1970 when I stared work in the Engineers Department of the local council as a cost clerk my wages were £11 per week. Compared to my friends who left school at 15 to become engineering apprentices, and who were paid just £6 a week that was a lot of money. The following year, I was sacked for Trade Union activity and after a period unemployed worked for the DHSS being paid £9 a week, which I made up by working till 9 at night and Saturday mornings. In 1972 I had a fairly responsible job working as an administrator for a clothing manufacturer. Even so my wages were only back up to £11 a week, and when I applied for the job my Mother who left school during the Depression had told me not to tell anyone I was applying for it, for fear of the job being taken by someone else! That already was the climate that was beginning to develop at the time. Fortunately, things improved and when I applied for a similar job at Doulton Glass Industries just over a year later I was able to push my wages up to the princely sum of £22 a week, a wage that I stayed on when I moved to Royal Doulton Tableware a few months later. At the time I got married in 1974 my wags then were only £25 a week, and it was only due to the high inflation of the time that by the time I left to go to University in 1977 that they had risen to just over £40 a week!

So you’ll understand and forgive me for being rather sceptical about the idea that just 6 years later sweatshop workers were earning ten times the amount I was earning as an administrative worker in the Marketing Division of a large company!! But, I can give further information. After several years spent partly unemployed partly working a few hours a week as a part-time, temporary lecturer I decided to take advantage of an initiative that the Tories had set up to try to reduce the official jobless numbers that had been rising from the late 70’s, and which increased markedly after the recession of 1981 when unemployment even on the heavily rigged official figures went over 3 million and provoked the People’s March For Jobs. The Tories introduced a scheme called the “Enterprise Allowance Scheme”, which paid £40 a week instead of the Dole money which was around £30 a week. As both me and my wife were both not working at the time we decided to sign up for the extra money for a year. As I was qualified as a teacher and had done a computer course we set up to provide Computer Training. Remember at the time not only did virtually no families have computers, but most businesses didn’t have computers either!!!! That didn’t matter we just wanted the extra £10 a week for a year.

As it happened I did get some work, and word of mouth spread and at the end of the year I could just about scrape a meagre living out of doing that alongside also selling cleaning materials door to door. My wife went back to work as a mainframe computer operator, and I continued running the business. Now bear in mind the idea that in 1983 Vingelis was claiming that sweat shop workers were earning £450 a week. In fact, even running my own business, being able to charge a high rate for providing a service which few people could provide at the time, even then I was charging £70 a day, which didn’t amount to £350 a week, because you’d probably only get on average 1 or 2 day’s work!! And, I remember working at two medium size engineering companies where I computerised their accounts and payroll systems. At one of them I know that the Manager was only earning £300 a week as late as 1987, because I saw all the payroll figures! At the other one of the bosses at the Company, asked how I could justify charging such a high rate for my time!

In fact, even when I packed in doing that and went to work for a local Council as a Technical Assistant in 1989, let alone 1983, and managed to get them to set me on at the highest rate they could pay for the job, I was only getting paid £11,000 a year, or around £230 a week!!!! So, as I said you’ll forgive me for finding it hard to believe that in 1983 either steel workers or particularly sweatshop workers were being paid anything like £500 a week, or even £350 a week!

So, why is Vingelis was led to come up with such statements? Because, he starts from a set of preconceived notions about the death spiral of Capitalism, about how Capitalism, and in particular Monopoly Capitalism is unable to raise workers living standards, particularly in developing countries, because after all the received wisdom about imperialism and globalisation is of its rapacious nature, and frames his argument accordingly. I have no idea where he got his information, but it reminded of Mandel’s comments in “Marxist Economic Theory” where he cites various examples of similar arguments and information put out by the Stalinists to justify their own theories about such immiseration. As he says, it does tremendous damage to Marxism, because the claims are so clearly contrary to the experiences of workers as to make all Marxists appear to be at best idiots, at worst idiotic liars in the eyes of the workers. I’m not suggesting that Vingelis is either an idiot or a liar, I am saying that if you start from a set of preconceived notions, and simply pick up on information, often poorly understood, on the basis of looking for confirmation of those notions you will find them, interpret them in the way that suits your existing ideas, and convince yourself that you were right all along. The Internet because it has such a vast amount of information, and a lot of it duff, a lot of it simply re-circulating other peoples views as though they were facts makes that almost inevitable.

And, in an atmosphere in which the media has to come out with all those hyperbole mentioned earlier that becomes even more self-fulfilling. I don’t know if anyone has watched the rather good Charlie Broooker’s “Newswipe” on BBC Four. See: Newswipe But, in the first two programmes he’s made some excellent satirical points on these issues. So on the one hand we have the hyperbolic headlines, but on the other because 24 hour news can’t actually deal with the news in any kind of in depth meaningful way – for fear of losing the viewers whose attention span is increasingly measured in seconds, just look at the way film makers now have to use continual jump cuts to keep the viewers attention – they have to keep the actual news content as basic as possible, simply looping footage of nothing happening, or else showing us pictures of nothing more happening than the cameraman taking a white balance ahead of actual having something worth filming!!!! Worse than that as Charlie showed in the last edition actually just making stuff up showing pictures of something that happened even months ago as though it was current! A good example, was a couple of years ago during the floods when the studio went out to a reporter who was going to tell us how terrible the floods were. The pictures were kept quite tight on the reporter, and for good reason, because it turned out with a wider angled shot he was standing in the only decent bit of water around!!! Again as Charlie said in his previous programme on the Credit Crunch, the BBC had sent one of its reporters out to interview people about how badly it was affecting their businesses, but despite his leading questions, one of them after the other said, well actually not that bad, not as bad as you people keep reporting on the news!!!

Or take the bit of snow we had a few weeks ago. It got more attention because London for once had more snow than people in the North. But, compared with the snowfalls of previous decades it was pitiful. Yet, I think it was Channel 4 came out with an entire programme some time later about “How Britain came to a standstill”, or words to that effect. And as Charlie Brooker pointed out the tendency now to have the news made by the viewer through more vox pops – especially as the cult of celebrity means everyone wants to have their fifteen minutes of fame – and the use of home video or mobile phone footage, means that endless photographs sent in of a few flakes of snow sitting on somebody’s car or garden means that the whole thing becomes reinforcing of how bad, how extensive something was, which in previous decades no one would have batted an eyelid about, or thought was out of the ordinary.

And that is true of the current economic crisis too. TV channels who want viewers, newspapers who want to sell newspapers have a vested interest in comparing the current situation to 1929, or the Great Depression, because even young people have heard of that! Comparing today’s situation to that makes it newsworthy in a world where only the extraordinary, the exceptional, the best, the worst, the most severe can be given airtime or column inches. Its no wonder that people absorb the consensus, even less wonder that those with a proclivity to see every cloud as the death knell of Capitalism, as proof of its immiserating nature, seize the opportunity to confirm their prejudices. And the pressure to conform becomes great, even to massage what you yourself have said in the past to fit in with that consensus.

Take another part of that discussion on the PR website. The leading economic commentator for PR is Bill Jeffries. I have more regard for him than most of the other economic commentators of the Left. During most of 2008, when all the Left were picking up on the doom and gloom reports that the media were putting out and declaring that Britain and the world were in recession, besides myself, Bill was one of the few people who stood out, and said no, the figures show that the economy is still growing, and like myself Bill recognises that the world economy is going through a Long Wave Boom, though he would date it some years earlier than would I.

But, the discussion here is instructive Financial crisis and recession . As I point out there Bill’s claim that no one on the Left saw the Financial Crisis is wrong. Not only had I written about it here in my blog in July, predicting not only that it was about to break, but setting out in fairly precise terms what DID turn out to be the reasons it was about to break, but I had also commented on the PR website to that effect, a comment, which at the time Bill replied to by saying no everything is fine, the US economy and world economy is still growing and so on. I don’t blame him for that. In terms of the purely economic data I would have agreed with him, but I spend a lot of time watching CNBC and Bloomberg listening to the traders, and reading the discussions of traders online which is where I picked up what was going on behind the scenes of the markets.

But, its interesting now that in his responses you can see there, Bill has changed history. Now he conforms with the consensus view of the time that, well yes, of course everyone knew there was a “soft recession” in the middle of 2008, you only needed to read a newspaper to know it!! In fact, now he fits in with the consensus view that this is already the longest recession since the Great Depression!!! How can that be? The average recession lasts around 10 to 18 months. According to US Data here even in the second quarter of 2008 – that is up to June 2008 – US economic growth was still 2.8%. It only became slightly negative in the third quarter of 2008 i.e. only for the last 3 quarters or 9 months!

The table in this link shows the difference between the current recession, and those of the 1970’s and 80’s. Recessions and Depressions . Although, there were minor downturns in 2001-2, and 2005-6, these were not recessions in the real sense. In fact, the current recession comes on the back of ten years of strong economic growth, and rapidly rising living standards for a large number of people on a global scale, particularly in newly developing economies in China, India, other parts of Asia and Latin America. Although, the Bureau of Economic Affairs, which officially dates US recessions places its beginning as December 2007, on the technical definiiotn of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative growth, its clear that on that basis the US recession did not begin until the Third Quarter of 2008. The recession in the UK began at that time too. So, on that basis the recession is only 9 months old, which is less than some of the shortest recessions recorded of ten months!

Compare that with the Depression in the US, which lasted for 43 months between 1929-33, but which came after a previous period of recession lasting itself 18 months between 1920-21, and was followed by a further recession lasting 13 months between 1937 and 1938, and which only really came to an end, because of increasing military production ahead of WWII. The situation in Europe was much worse with an almost continual period of recession, low growth or Depression extending through the 1920’s through until the outbreak of War. That is clearly different in both scope and duration and depth to anything we see today.

But, we don’t have to go back that far. Look at the situation of the 1980’s. The sharp recession of 1981-2 lasted 16 months, but like the 1930’s that recession came on the back of a recession just a few months earlier in 1980 which lasted 6 months, and which itself came only a few years after the sharp recession of the mid 70’s “what Mandel called in his book “The Second Slump” - which also lasted 16 months, and itself followed on from the mild recession of 1970-1, which lasted 11 months.
When you compare that data with the current data the difference becomes apparent. This is neither a Great Depression, or even that Great a recession. It is more akin to the kinds of recessions that were seen during the last Long Wave Boom, but with the added complication of the severe financial crisis.

In the Dog Days the media always looks for stories to fill out its pages. In the modern world of instant gratification, short attention spans, and the need to sensationalise everything, the need to describe the current situation in hyperbole is inevitable, and those with catastrophist expectations of a capitalist collapse will jump on the bandwagon to feed their fantasies. But, its more like a Snow Day, fun for those involved while it lasts, but quickly forgotten when its over. The job of a Marxist is to keep your head, and analyse the facts. Only on that basis can you try to avoid being drawn along with the tide on either the upswing or the downswing.