Author: Rich Will

‘José Saramago in the Land of the Blind’, by me

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In the course of José Saramago’s ‘Blindness’, a euphorically pessimistic novel about a sudden and unexplained epidemic of blindness in an unnamed city and country, he makes some remarks about blind people which, in the context of a plague which has left all but one individual without sight, make a lot of sense. His essential argument has to do with solidarity making human society possible, so it seems reasonable to speculate that in a situation where nobody could actually see the Other, human feelings would take second place to a feral need to survive at any cost, which is what we witness throughout the novel.

There are, however, a couple of moments in the book where he seems keen to take it a little bit further and actually state quite baldly that the only reason that blind people have any feelings at all is because we are there to help them out. Which seems a little harsh, and perhaps a bit rich seeing as he himself wears a particularly thick pair of spectacles.

I don’t know if many blind people have read the novel. I did find one comment from a ‘visually impaired’ person who felt that ‘blindness operates in his text as both an intertextual sign and as a referent’, which is of course helpful, but may as far as I know not actually mean very much. Anyhoo. For it to be read widely in the, ahem, ‘blind community’ it would have to be published in Braille, and I don’t think it has been. Maybe, if it ever is, he might one day face a Salman Rushdie-style Fatwah, with copies of his and probably other books being burnt in obviously carefully controlled environments and our TV screens filled with the faces of angry blind people holding up photos of camels and Paris Hilton and proclaiming with fury ‘THIS MAN MUST DIE!’.

I digress. Here, in all it’s not-really-worth-reading-if-you-haven’t-read-the-book entirety is an essay I recently wrote about the novel, upon reading of the which (?!) they agreed to let me back into University, which is where I’ll be from October and hopefully up until the end of my life in, ooh, dozens of years’ time. I would particularly appreciate hearing any constructive comments from any blind readers out there, but unfortunately my experimentary attempts to make it easier for them by simply writing have sadly proved as fruitless as, erm, my daily diet.

Alors je me tais.

Would you consider H.G. Wells’ dictum, “In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king” an appropriate epigraph to ‘Blindness’ by Jose Saramago?

The mock-biblical quote with which Saramago chooses to open ”Blindness’ is instructive and ambiguous: ‘If you can look, see. If you can see, observe’. The verb he chooses to employ, ‘reparar’, has two meanings: both to take note of something and to remedy it. The conflation of seeing and understanding is one deeply embedded in our languages and our cultures, and Saramago makes it even more explicit on the final page of the book:

‘I think we didn’t go blind, I think we are blind, Blind people who can see, Blind people who can see without seeing.’

Saramago is very fond of aphorisms and sayings, of what ‘someone once said’. At two points in the book HG Well’s quote is mentioned: one of the internees’ attempts to apply it to the world in which they find themselves is rejected by one of his companions:

‘Someone once said that in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king, Forget about what someone once said, This is different, Here not even people with one eye would be saved.’

Also, towards the end of the book the doctor’s wife, the only person who retains her sight throught the epidemic, herself claims that she is neither the King nor the Queen of this ‘land of the blind’:

‘None of you know, none of you can know what it is to have eyes in a world of blind people, I’m no queen, no, I’m simply the one who was born to witness the horror.’

The initial structure of ‘Ensaio sobre a cegueira’ reflects that of several other Saramago books in which unexplained cataclysmic events give birth to a crisis of government and a social breakdown. In ”The Stone Raft’ Portugal and Spain become detached from the rest of Europe and float off into the Atlantic. In ‘Seeing’ a political crisis is engendered by a sudden and unexplained surge in the number of blank votes at a general election, leading to Government panic and martial law; and in his new book death ceases to kill, and once again the authorities are forced into desperate and hollow measures.

In ‘Blindness’, as with the aforementioned two books, the story is set in an unnamed country with characters known only by the descriptive epithets ascribed to them on their first appearance. Several of the characters comment that ‘blind people need no name’. It is also unclear if in Saramago’s novel he is talking about a ‘land’ of the blind or about an epidemic that infects all humanity across the world.

It is clear, however, that the ‘white blindness’ that keeps them from seeing is not conventional blindness. Something is profoundly wrong and in depriving all but one of his characters of vision, Saramago enacts a metamorphisis which inverts that of both Franz Kafka in ‘Metamorphisis’ and of James Kelman in ‘How Late it was, How Late’.

The vision of the world he wants the reader to witness is profoundly troubling and, insofar as it can be seen as an allegory, deeply pessimistic. In an interview with the magazine ‘Visão’ in 2002 he expressed the belief that ‘the world conjuncture at present is absolutely terrifying’. His intention is to make us ‘re-see’ the world; he told the Observer in May 2006:

“The painter paints, the musician makes music, the novelist writes novels. But I believe that we all have some influence, not because of the fact that one is an artist, but because we are citizens. As citizens, we all have an obligation to intervene and become involved, it’s the citizen who changes things. I can’t imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement. Yes, I’m a writer, but I live in this world and my writing doesn’t exist on a separate level. And if people know who I am and read my books, well, good; that way, if I have something more to say, then everyone benefits.”

His books, then, have a very clear political point to make, a vision of the world we share which is intensely politicised. He told another interviewer in Spring 2002 that ‘I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn’t know how to write essays.’

The powers-that-be in his books are shown to be wanting. The authorities in ‘Blindness’ – as in both ‘Seeing’, ‘The Stone Raft’ and his latest novel – are hapless, cynical and ultimately unable to deal with the situation. They are seen trying to deal with the latest developments in the crisis and to save their own positions by immediately turning to the most authoritarian measures without thinking of the possible consequences:

‘Where are we going to put all these people, We’ll sort it out, occupy all the dormitory wards (in the asylum), If we do that the contaminated will come into direct contact with the blind, They’ll probably, sooner or later, go blind anyway, And what shall we do with the drivers of the buses, Just stick them in there too.’

A concern of the novel is the question of how the blind can organise themselves. As soon as those infected arrive in the asylum, attempts are made at organisation but the one person capable of establishing and maintaining order must hide the truth from her companions because, as her husband puts it, ‘they will probably turn you into their slave’. The repeated appeal for organisation goes largely unheeded.

When all order breaks down in the asylum, some of the internees attempt to establish their own authoritarian order. This, it is eventually revealed, is mainly due to the presence of someone who was formerly blind – not, of course, a one-eyed man, but someone with an obvious advantage:

‘Lucky so-and-sos…they can use him as a guide, a trained blind person is worth his weight in gold.’

The rule of these bullies is horrifyingly brutal but short-lived. When the central group of characters manage to leave the asylum, the doctor’s wife is able to find shelter and food, but the world that greets her eyes is one in which ‘time is ending, the rot is spreading, diseases find the door wide open, the water is running out and the food is turning into poison’. Here the central character is the only seeing person in a world entirely populated by the blind.

The characters have to try to survive in a world where ordinary day-to-day life has become impossible. Part of that day-to-day-life is based upon notions of paid work, private property, the commercial distribution of food, public provision of transport, health care, and the utilities and the maintanance of law and order. Also essential to our way of life is a belief that things are improving and will continue to improve in the future. The problem the novel poses is what happens when we can no longer depend on all of these things. This is part of the novel where the allegory with our present times is particularly precise and intense; the account of what the doctor’s wife sees is reminiscent of recent newspaper reports from parts of the world devastated by war, man-made famine or environmental cataclysm. Saramago urges us to confront the question of what alternative sources of authority we might look to in a world where our political leadership has utterly failed us.

One possible answer is that religion might provide a refuge, or at least some comfort, in desperate times. But the scene in the church, where all the icons and images are revealed to be blindfolded, is possibly the centrepiece of Saramago’s vision, of a world he exhorts us to ‘reparar’. God, he tells us ‘doesn’t deserve to see’ what we have witnessed. It is possible to see the preceding scene, in which the doctor’s wife sees the dancing flames from the supermarket basement and smells the burning bodies of those trapped below, as a vision of hell. The remaining humans are blind, burning in a subterranean hell, and there is no God to witness or to save them. Is it this realisation, and the fact that ‘the streets were looking worse and worse with each hour that passed’ – simply that things cannot possibly get any worse – that causes the epidemic to suddenly end?

In the HG Wells story the visitor to the ‘Land of the Blind’ sees a land where the inhabitants have managed to adapt and live without sight, but in Saramago’s much darker story a lack of vision is only compensated for by solidarity. At the start of the epidemic the first blind man is told by his rescuer ‘today it’s you, tomorrow it might be me’, and this sentiment is echoed throughout the book, for example when the doctor’s wife tells her husband:

‘Today is today, tomorrow is tomorrow, it’s today that I have the responsability (…) What responsibility, The responsibility that comes with having eyes when others have lost them, You can neither guide nor feed all the blind people in the world, I should.’

It is no accident that Saramago chooses a woman as his central protaganist. He seems to suggest that women are more capable of ‘seeing’ other people, whereas men tend to resort to brutality and attempts to exploit others. Often this selflessness on behalf of his female characters grates somewhat, but then his archetypal characters are rarely granted complex sentiments, instead exhibiting a certain naivety, particularly in the case of the men. When it has become clear to the reader that the man who helped the first blind man to his house has taken his car keys in order to steal his car, the latter remarks:

‘He probably just forgot, took them without realising.’

To some extent Saramago is setting his hapless protaganists up for a fall, for the moment when it will become clear that the powers-that-be have betrayed and abandoned them, and that all they have to depend on is each other.

Saramago believes artists share the responsibilty of all citizens, a responsibility to remedy the wrongs that we see around us. In another popular Portuguese proverb that he choses not to use in the novel (‘Eyes that don’t see, heart that doesn’t feel’) this common blindness prevents people not only from seeing, but also from feeling. In the land of the blind, people leave their houses and are unable to find them again, lose contact with their families, are forced to live a feral existence which precludes human sympathies. For Saramago, unlike in the story by HG Wells, it is impossible for human beings to live without the power of sight, but the central argument of his essay about blindness is that mutual understanding and a sense of solidarity with one another is what makes us human.

Damien Hirst: “F*ck all there at the end of the day”

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A Dead Shark Isn’t Art, Stuckism International 2003
In addition to being worth over £100 million, Damien Hirst is, according to today’s Observer, the most powerful figure in the art world today. His new work will cost between £8-£10 million to produce, but when it is complete it will be worth a hell of a lot more:

Damien Hirst’s work in progress is a small, delicate object: a life-size human skull. Not just any skull, mind, but one cast in platinum and encased entirely in diamonds – some 8,500 in all. It will be the most expensive work of art ever created, costing between £8m and £10m.

‘I just want to celebrate life by saying to hell with death,’ said the artist, ‘What better way of saying that than by taking the ultimate symbol of death and covering it in the ultimate symbol of luxury, desire and decadence? The only part of the original skull that will remain will be the teeth. You need that grotesque element for it to work as a piece of art. God is in the details and all that.’

Of course, diamonds are, for some people, as both Kanye West and Miss Dynamite have been keen to tell us, more than just a symbol of ‘luxury, desire and decadence’:

In many African countries, including Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) diamonds have been, and continue to be linked to terrible human rights abuses either by insurgent groups to fuel conflict and carry out atrocities against innocent civilians or by unscrupulous government who are equally brutal.

In addition concerns have mounted over links between conflict diamonds and money laundering by groups like Al-Qaeda. While the Kimberley Process marks a positive step towards protecting the legitimate diamond industry and consumers from purchasing tainted stones, much reform is needed. KP’s narrow definition of conflict diamonds does not include polished stones and jewelry and could exclude diamonds originating from recognized governments such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. (from Amnesty International‘s website).

Hirst doesn’t seem to be aware of this. As for ‘sticking two fingers up to death’, the writer Saul Bellow once remarked that ‘death is the solid backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything’. He was of course a lot older and nearer death than Damien Hirst, and may have been less inclined to insult that which loomed much larger and darker in his mirror than it does in Hirst’s presumably diamond-encrusted one. Oddly enough, the title of Hirst’s most famous (and inevitably most expensive) work was ‘The Physical Impossibility Of Death In the Mind Of Someone Living’.

That work was his dead shark in a tank of formaldehyde, in case you were wondering. Not that I want to patronise anyone here, it’s just that most people, myself included, tend to remember the work itself rather than the name. It’s not clear whether the name is particularly important, given that Hirst once wrote of his own works:

“They’re bright and they’re zany – but there’s fuck all there at the end of the day.”

What strikes me about Hirst’s works is that, although he’s constantly cited as one of the world’s most successful artists, there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of this in anything other than commmercial terms. I’ve never heard anyone mention his shark piece in any context beyond the fact that it exists and that it cost a lot of money. There is never any indication that it has any meaning for anyone, let alone the artist himself. It has no resonance, it simply does not register in any discourse about art or about the world. Could that not be one mark of failure for an artist?

Maybe his next work should be a huge white diamond-encrusted elephant. He could get those French blokes to help him put it together. Then when they’ve finished we could all read in the newspapers about how fucking expensive the whole thing has been.

Dych chi’n siarad Italian?

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I take a certain amount of encouragement in life from the fact that I don’t speak Italian. Perche? Well, I have tried to learn, a little bit. I spent a few days in Rome years ago wondering why all those street signs with arrows on them all said ‘Unica Via’, and I can put together some simple phrases like ‘No me piacce il calcio’, ‘ Dove c’e musica’ and ‘Oggi ho fatto qualcosa nostra’, but I don’t I know if I’d be up to, say, having a short conversation about il tempo meterelogico. So how can my lack of basic Italian conversation skills be a source of encouragement, even pride?

Well, Signor Nessuno, what it is is that I like knowing that it will always be an opzione. If at any point I ever have cause to become really bored or despondent, like per exemplo if we ever get to the point where newspapers stop asking asinine rhetorical questions like ‘is it too late to prevent global warming’ and start accepting that we really are actually finito nella merda, then at that point I can always invest in a cheap grammar book and a copy of ‘La Republica’ or whatever the most left-wing daily newspaper is and comenzare (a?) aprendere.

See, it’s easy to learn Italian, and it’s fun and makes your brain grow. To the size of an Italian’s! If I ever get really interested in it I could always go and live there for a while, although one less radical option would be to find an intercambio. Recently I put an ad on the gumtree site ’cause of wanting to practice those few languages in which I can have a short conversation about the weather. Italian wasn’t one of them, obviously, which is why it was a bit of a sorpresa to recebere una risposta from una ragazza Italiana. Ma no voglio praticare mi inglese! I protested in reply. Alguni personi sono idioti.

I’d recommend this nozione of Learning Italian as Potential Life TherapyTM to anyone feeling down, bored or even suicida.

If you’re ever faced with someone – friend, family, or even someone you work with but don’t actually like – who is entertaining thoughts of topping theyselves, just ask ‘parle italiano?’ If by any chance they answer ‘Ma sono italiano!’, you could always try, I dunno, ‘Dych chi’n siarad Cymraeg?’, although that might actually not work in quite the same way. If you’re for any reason having this conversation with Berlesconi or Paulo di Canio, just tell them, in all seriousness ‘Penso, come amico, que la migliore cosa que le puoi fare è suicidaresi. Stronzo fascista‘.

Nightmare on ESOL Street

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Imagine a war between Somalia and Iraq. How bad would that be? Imagine if Sri Lanka joined in! It’s … inconceivable. Except it’s not, I conceived of it the other day, in class.

I imagined it just after each of my two students had finished speaking, reasonably eloquently for a low-level class, on the subject of how tragically, totally and infamously had their respective countries collapsed into barbarism, and about how they could, in almost all certainty, never go home again.

We sat in silent reflection for a moment or so. I had to try to lift the gloom that had descended. I had to try and cheer us all up. I thought, what’s a way in which things, in the absence of hope, could possibly be worse. A simple answer came to me. So I suggested it. They looked at me blankly. They hadn’t understood. I repeated it slowly. They looked confused. We did ‘between’ and ‘invaded’. And ‘war’. They smiled. We laughed! What an idea! Gayness returned to the classroom. What a relief!

One of my students is an interesting character; he comes from Basra and speaks Aramaic, which they! told me was a dead language, but means that speaking to him is a bit like speaking to Jesus, or something. He used to play football for the Iraqi reserve team, and hasn’t been to the cinema since 1974. As his surname is Baki, and he introduces himself to people with his surname, and he has a slight problem with his ‘ps’ and ‘bs’, he spent the first few months of his life here calling himself ‘Paki’.

The other student (or ‘customer’, as they infuriatingly refer to them in my, fuck it, school) used to be Somali, but is now French, and I when I came back from my break the other day she actually appeared to be reading a book, and the book was in French, so, you know, she must be very clever.

We moved on to talk of other matters, and to tackle together a simple worksheet I had assembled on the difference between ‘jack up’ and ‘jack off’. But throughout the rest of the lesson my outlandish notion, that two of the world’s most beleaguered nations might for no reason at all turn on one another in warfare, came to be mentioned more than once, so much in fact that by the end of the lesson I was beginning to regret ever having made – purely in jest – such a suggestion. I began to feel a little … apprehensive. Had I, with my glib remark, somehow unleashed forces that it would ultimately prove difficult to contain?

Slavoj Žižek on ‘Liberal Communism’

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You know, from a certain perspective, you could be forgiven for thinking that all is well with the world at present. Bill Gates, formerly one of the most avaricious capitalists on the planet, is giving away his fortune as quickly as he can and is now is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, spreading his munificence to fight malaria and Aids and to provide education for all those people who so desperately need a chance in life. Bongo off of U2, one of the most famous and admired (although not in my house) global celebrities, a man with an undoubtedly sincere commitment to social justice and equality, has persuaded some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to donate significant portions of their wealth to progressive causes, and furthermore is on such good terms with the our present global overseers that he recently presented his friend George with gifts of an ipod and a Bible, as well as getting his buddy Condoleeza to write about her top ten musical favourites in the edition of the Independent he guest-edited this week.

Is it even conceivable that anyone might have a problem with any of this? The rich and powerful have been converted to social justice and equality, the struggle is over, all that is being asked of us is that we spend spend spend our way to freedom, equality and prosperity!!!

Well, I for one have a bias to confess which is that I cannot fucking stand the Independent; a wretched and desperate attempt to find or create a newspaper readership among those people too clever for the Times but who for some inexplicable reason feel unable to read the Guardian. I find it as gimmicky, dull and inconsequential as a copy of Que! or Metro. But that is just my own probably-at-the-end-of-the-day-a-little-extreme-Richard p.o.v. I do on the other hand love a good read of the London Review of Books, which is where the Wisest Man Alive Today, Slavoj Žižek, recently wrote the following words:

So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman.

Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours, enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.

Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach. There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa (liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the crisis in a creative and unconventional way.

Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what makes business success worthwhile.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.

Wow. Slavoj Žižek, ladies and gentlmen: I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce his name, but he certainly knows how to tell ’em.

Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei!

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Well I’m ashamed to admit it but my career as a habitual shoplifter never really got off the ground, or even down the aisle. That doesn’t mean that I no longer need to steal things; while I now earn approximately sixteen times what I got paid for teaching English in Madrid, I’d be horrified to think that I’d reached the peak of my earning potential.

My short-lived interest in retail thievery was inevitably inspired more by political sentiment than by any deep-rooted criminal instincts. What the good people at yomango get up to is of course entirely laudable, and I was quite excited to read in the Guardian about the activities of ‘Germany’s real-life Robin Hood gang’, who have taken to charging en masse into luxury goods stores, taking whatever they like and then distributing it among ‘Germany’s new underclass’:

… interns who worked for months in glamorous publishing houses without being paid, low-wage nursery assistants, mums forced to take part-time jobs as cleaning ladies and “one-euro jobbers”, performing menial tasks under a German government welfare scheme. The gang said it didn’t merely object to capitalism. Instead it was making a stand against Prekarisierung or “precariousness” – the uncertainty facing 20- and lower 30somethings as they try to navigate their way through Europe’s gloomy neo-liberal jobs market.

Although I’ve fortunately never been a victim of it myself, I’ve long found it nauseating that young graduates are often expected to work for a year or more for nichts in the hope that there may at the end of it be a professional job which will afford them the lifestyle which their parents took for granted:

”We are talking about young, relatively well-educated people whose parents easily attained secure jobs and middle-class status. The situation now is far more insecure. For the first time in many generations, young people in Europe have bleaker prospects than their parents did. They are not as optimistic or utopian as people were in the 60s, or as pessimistic and depressed as they were in the 80s. Instead they find themselves having to walk a tightrope.”

If they aren’t working for free, a lot of highly qualified young people are working for casi nada. An article in El País last year highlighted the ‘La generación de los mil euros’, graduates in their late twenties and early thirties who may have diplomas coming out of their culos and speak various foreign languages but just can’t find a job which pays more than a thousand euros a month and who are stuck paying more than a third of their income on rent, living grudgingly in shared apartments, with no savings and no chance of buying a house or sustaining a family, living a hand-to-mouth existence and gradually ‘realising that the future is not where they believed it to be’.

I was reminded of this recently when reading a novel by someone who is emphatically neither young nor Spanish, José Saramago. In his new book, set in an unnamed country, death ceases to kill, and the authorities are suddenly faced with the rapidly mounting panic of the funeral industry and the insurance companies, the collapse of the health system and the overflowing old people’s homes, along with the diplomatically tricky prospect of anyone with an almost-but-not-quite defunct relative simply sneaking them up to the border with the neighbouring country and tipping them over the line into death.

All in all another day at the office for Portugal’s leading octogenarian Nobel-Prize winning ultra-pessimist, then. But what has all this got to do with shoplifting? Nothing whatsoever. It just struck me that there is a potential parallel between ‘young people in Europe (having) bleaker prospects than their parents did’ and the discussion that takes place early in the novel between various academics, government officials and bishops about just what the hell they are going to do:

The eight men seated around the table had been asked to reflect upon the consequences of a future without death and to construct from the available facts a plausible prediction of the new questions that society would have to deal with, along with, it must be said, the inevitable aggravation of the old questions.

Perhaps what we are facing is not a future without death, but a future without a future. Unless things change immediately, and radically, of course, something which surely the vast majority of sane thinking people regard as a virtual impossibility:

The only rational response to both the impending end of the Oil Age and the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political pressure, and our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity.(George Monbiot in the Guardian, December 2nd, 2003)

As we are gradually stripped of the illusion that ongoing exponential economic growth will inevitably lead to human betterment, what new questions will society have to deal with, along with, it must be said, what inevitable aggravations of the old questions?

It’s pretty obvious that for most of the world’s population day-to-day life will become, has become, more of a struggle. But how will the rich live in the future? Will they see any point in continuing to strive for more and more unimaginable wealth in an increasingly threatening climate? Or will they simply slack off and enjoy their riches while the unprotected world crashes and burns?

In JG Ballard’s ‘Cocaine Nights’ his characters have retired from Northern Europe to sunnier parts of the world, to live lives of pure leisure. They soon get bored, and the sterility, isolation and entropy that sets in is underscored by cravings for ‘the Real’, an unsimulated visceral experience of violence and psychological terror, which arrives in the form of a charismatic individual willing to provide such a ‘spectacle’.

Those cravings exist at street level too, I think. It partially explains the phenomenon of yomango and the German Robin Hood gang. What better exemplifies our current fears than the apparent phenomenon of Happy Slapping? Whether or not it actually exists, it fills a Clockwork Orange-shaped hole in our culture – some people are never going to be satisfied with computer game simulations of the ecstasies of random violence and crime.

As someone wise pointed out a while ago: The future holds nothing else but confrontation.

Ealing – the Promised Land of the Polish People?

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I have nothing whatsoever against Polish people; although I can’t claim that any of my best friends are Polish, I have met some charming Poles over the years. In fact at the moment I have a couple in my class who I like enormously. And years ago, in my very first teaching job, on a glorious summer’s day in Dublin, I was given a class of 14 Polish au pairs, who seemed very sweet, outgoing and broadminded. Or at least they did until I happened to mention the word ‘gypsy’.

From that moment, as they skies outside the classroom suddenly filled with dark clouds the atmosphere in the classroom quickly turned to one of unadulterated racial hatred. Everybody had a bitter tale to tell about the filthy, lazy, scrounging scum plaguing their land. I was genuinely shocked as noone seemed to have the slightest reservation about advocating violence against an evidently fairly beleaguered community – 70% of Poland’s gypsies were murdered in the Holocaust.

Of course it would have been churlish of me to point out that six of the main extermination camps were located in Poland, especially as so far as the Nazis were concerned it was all part of Germany anyway. But it just so happened that at the time I was reading a book about alcohol consumption around Eastern Europe, which mentioned that there is a very potent myth about the number of Jewish people living in Poland. Around three million died in the death camps, it said, and although official statistics state that there are now only about 15,000 remaining, most Polish people would apparently state with confidence that the real number is more like a good couple of million. So in the midst of this firestorm of racist attitudes I decided to find out if this was really the case, and my students, who before had seemed perfectly good-natured and tolerant, obliged by letting me know in detail about the scandal of Poland’s hidden jews. I don’t think they were talking about Anne Frank.

Partly because of this, I’ve never considered Poland as a possible destination, either for living or for a holiday. Too cold, too grey, too superstitious and too, well, racist. And certainly as far as the political side of things go, I think I’ve recently been considerably vindicated. The weather, as far as I know, has not improved much either.

I can understand, then, why people might not want to live there. Now, of course, the country is part of the EU and Polish people are free to travel to work – anyone who has been anywhere near Victoria coach station in London over the last couple of years can witness just how many of them are keen to come to the UK and find a job. They come to places like Ealing.

Now I want to make it clear here that I am totally in favour of immigration. It enriches the destination country economically, culturally, linguistically – in every conceivable way. Places like London, Sheffield and, now, Dublin are infinitely better-off for enjoying such a variety of different peoples from all over the world, and anyone who cares to suggest otherwise is well advised to spend a year or so in a place that doesn’t have such a mix – China, for example – and then see how they feel.

The problem that I do have is that here in Ealing, where I work, that mix is largely limited to the people you see on the streets. Because the moment you step into a cafe or a pub, the first thing you notice is: that almost all the staff are white. It’s quite rare to be served by black, Pakistani or Bengali people – by, that is, locals. The majority of people working in these jobs are Polish and have come here very recently, and they are doing jobs which, on the whole, would otherwise be done by people who were either born here or have lived here longer – for want of a better word, British people, wherever their families originated from.

The same point was made in an article in the Guardian late last year by Polly Toynbee, in which she talked about the recent opportunistic changes in Conservative Party Immigration policy. Her basic argument was that ‘the use of cheap foreign Labour may boost our GDP, but it enriches the well-off at the expense of the low-paid’. I can see her point, insofar as she is talking about recent arrivals from the new EU countries:

Bercow (Conservative MP) and Labour hotly assert that migrants don’t take jobs from British workers nor depress wages. But there is no evidence for this assertion. It is impossible to know what level wages might be at or how many unemployed might have been tugged into jobs at higher pay rates had Britain kept its doors shut to new EU citizens until their countries had caught up economically.

Blair and Brown embrace the inevitability of globalisation, but make a deliberately class-blind analysis. Migrants do bring GDP growth, but remember the Gate Gourmet workers fired to make way for cheaper newly arrived workers. Migrants add to the profits of the company and thus to GDP. They keep down the cost of flying for people wealthy enough to fly. They also hold down the pay rate for all other low-paid workers, keeping wage inflation remarkably low and the Bank of England very happy.

But all this does nothing but harm to the old Gate Gourmet workers and to all the other low-paid. This is what globalisation does, widening the gap between rich and poor. Cheap labour provides more cheap services for the rich to get their lifestyle at a premium while nailing an ever-larger swath of the workforce to the minimum-wage floor. The greatest job growth is in rock-bottom jobs.

London has the most migrant workers and it also has the most unemployed. Who are they? Many more young people are not in education or work after generations of deprivation. Bangladeshis are among the poorest because 80% of their women don’t work. Many more London single mothers can’t work because the cost of housing and childcare means even tax credits don’t lift them out of a poverty trap where a low-paid job means working at a loss.

This is quite a sophisticated argument because the superficial idea – that Eastern Europeans are coming over here and taking ‘our’ jobs, thereby deflating wages – seems like a classic racist rallying call. But we are talking here about a very sudden phenomenon, and one that seems to have been orchestrated from above precisely in order to achieve the objective of lowering wages.

I’m not actually very sure how I feel about the conclusions she comes to. In terms of possible solutions, the following is both seductive and shocking:

Try this thought experiment: 43.5% of nurses recruited by the NHS since 1999 come from outside the UK. What if that were banned? The NHS in London would find clever ways to recruit from the city’s mass of underqualified boys and girls, single mothers and other non-workers. Recruiters might set up special classes for 14-year-olds interested in nursing, promising work as nursing assistants while they trained, places to live in attractive nurses’ homes, starter homes for key-worker families, status and good pay. The offer would be irresistible, and yes, taxes would be higher.

Other employers would be in hot contest to entice the forgotten people into building, transport and catering. Adam Smith’s hidden hand of the market would force the workless into work. It is shocking that 30,000 of the 70,000 workers being employed to start work on transport infrastructure for the Olympics are to be east Europeans, not impoverished Londoners.

I’m not so certain about the ‘hidden hand of the market’. I think that’s just as much as a myth as Poland’s hidden millions of Jews. After all, one of the main reasons why people from low-wage countries are suddenly able to work in different countries is because the not-so-hidden-hand of European business and pro-business policy makers has determined that it is a convenient way of ‘reducing costs’ and making us all more ‘competitive’. And I find it doubtful that the new EU countries will rapidly ‘catch up’ with their wealthier neighbours, and find it difficult to believe that anyone really believes that – the most quoted statistic given for their ongoing level of economic development is GDP, which is, of course, and especially given that we are talking about wages here, nonsense. Those countries have been brought into the EU because it is cheaper to produce things there and workers will work for less money.

Nevertheless I don’t think there is some kind of idealised version of EU capitalism where everybody could be content to stay put and employers would have their workers’ best interests at heart. Globalised capitalism only allows and encourages people to move when it’s in its own very best interests, and it is cheaper to hand over low-paid jobs to EU newcomers than it is to provide longer-term immigrants – asylum seekers, for example – with the support and language training they need in order to be able to establish themselves here more permanently with proper jobs. After all, nobody should be working all week for the pittance that they pay you to work in cafes or bars these days, whether they were born in Britain, Bangladesh or Poland.

In conclusion, then, two unrelated points. One, that people from the Deep South must find it reasonably amusing that there is a country by the name of Po’land. And secondly, a prediction: in the not-too-distant future someone will pop up to proclaim that Poland is the China of Europe. Oh wait, someone just did.

The Scramble for Angola

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The Portuguese generally take a lot of pride in the fact that Brazil, a country they discovered, has become one of the most vibrant and varied countries on earth and a true cultural superpower. That diversity, of course, came into being largely because of the slave trade. But slavery is a word seldom mentioned in discussions of Portugal’s glorious age of expansion and empire.

A current exhibition in the museum in Lagos makes a laudable attempt to promote Portugal’s own multicultural heritage, talking at length about how successive migrations of humanity have culturally enriched European societies and made them much more ethnically diverse, but fails to mention how forced migrations of people created economic riches, or even the remarkable fact that Lagos itself would give its name to the capital of Africa’s most populous nation, as many of the slaves traded in the Algarve originated in that part of Africa.

Portugal first arrived in what would become its largest African colony, Angola, in 1483, and they would stay there for almost 500 years. Like any colonial relationship it was one of brutality and forced obedience:

Until the late 1900’s Portugal used the area as a “slave pool” for its far more lucrative colony in Brazil and to benefit from the occasional discovery of precious gemstones and metals. Angola suffered from one of the most backward forms of colonialist rule. (from www.africanet.com)

According to an article by Helena Matos in Público, it always held a special significance for the Portuguese:

(There is a) word which, in Portugal, throughout the entire twentieth century was murmured in times of crisis and in the inevitable periods of euphoria that followed. That word is Angola.

Generations and generations of Portuguese people were born, grew up and died hearing stories of Angola’s riches. Of the progress of Angola. Of the potential of Angola. Of German and English geologists disguised as priests and tourists running around the country secretly excavating its wealth. About the negotiations in which Britain and France tried to placate Hitler offering him Angola. Of the sale of Angola. Of the Russians and Americans that craved Angola’s riches. Of the new nation that was going to be born in Africa.

It remained one of the jewels in the crown of empire until, shortly after the 1974 revolution, the Portuguese grudgingly packed their bags and went home.

Now the Portuguese state is sending further missions to Angola. At the start of April the newspapers and TV news bulletins were packed with stories about the Prime Minister’s impending visit to the former colony, accompanied by 300 of the country’s leading business people and with two billion euros of credit on offer. The weekly news magazine Visão highlighted stories of those of those who have returned and those few who never left. It boasted of Portugal’s extensive knowledge of the terrain, its linguistic and cultural links and shared history. It did however omit to mention that that long relationship was a massively unequal one based on forced occupation and the most brutal exploitation of the lives of countless millions of people, and ended in a fifteen-year war for independence. That war sowed the seeds of the civil war that followed, which may have recently ended – for the moment at least – but which has left the country with a life expectancy index of 37 and ranked 160th in the 2005 Human Development Report.

Several hundred years ago Portugal was competing for control of large parts of the world’s extent and population with other (equally brutal) colonial powers. Now it is returning to the scenes of its colonial crimes, it faces a new, powerful and determined adversary.

China is partly after Angola’s oil reserves – it already buys 30%, and derives most of its crude oil from the same source. It is also looking to create Lebensraum, due to the pressing need to keep creating jobs at home and overseas in order to maintain and raise its own furious economic momentum. As the LA Times reports:

A main driver in the relationship is China’s insatiable need for energy. Its oil imports are surging, and African oil now accounts for nearly 30% of the total. The China National Petroleum Corp. has invested billions of dollars to take control of Sudan’s oil production, estimated at 150,000 barrels per day and growing. Another Chinese oil company agreed in January 2006 to pay $2.3 billion for a major stake in a Nigerian oil field.

Africa is certainly benefiting. China’s demand for resources has driven up prices, propelling significant GDP gains in many countries. China has educated thousands of African university students, and it sends Africa hundreds of doctors and advisors each year. Chinese firms are building roads, rehabilitating infrastructure and bringing cellphone service to places that land lines never reached.

It is a formidable opponent – compared to Portugal’s 2 billion in credit, Chinese state banks are looking to provide double that amount. And according to Visão:

A year ago China occupied fourth place in the Angolan imports, a position that will, in 2006, threaten Portugal’s leadership. It is possible that the number of Chinese people will soon exceed the number of Portuguese. (The Chinese businessman) Li Yun’s new shop will compete with a Portuguese-owned business next door. Faced with the unbeatable prices of the Asian giant (between three and five times cheaper), the Portuguese firm has already started to import materials from the East.

The cost of Portugal’s past involvement in Angola’s development has been very clear. What does China’s concern for the country’s future have in store?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has criticized the funding given by China, saying that Beijing does not care how the money is used. The IMF had offered subsidized loans to Luanda on condition that it allowed effective monitoring of how the money was used and that it reformed its corrupt power system, which benefits a restricted elite and leaves 13 million people in poverty. (from www.asianews.com)

Visão backs up this point:

The conditions that the IMF impose in terms of Macroeconomic policies and the the demands of Western powers in terms of Human Rights are not an ssue for the Chinese. They do business and don’t ask questions. A number of UN Security Coucil resolutions in relation to African countries, particularly to Sudan, “have been blocked by the Chinese”. And Visão has discovered that a European country has recently made a proposal to the Angolan government along the lines of that proposed by the Chinese banks.

Which might well lead us straight back to Portugal.

As I said, China’s motivations are many – including both petrol and global as well as local political influence – and they are the same motivations that have led to deepening relationships not just with other African countries but also with Venezuela, for example.

According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Chinese interests are not merely limited to petrol, but also involve the supply of food, acquiring fertile territory in Africa.The principal objective, says Santos Neves of the IISS, “is internal social stability”.

So part of the motivation is, as I say, to provide jobs and stave off potential disquiet from unemployed workers back home:

Chinese engineers work in Africa for around 100 euros a month, as opposed to six hundred paid by French companies to African foremen. This signifies that contracts with China close down job opportunities to Africans and limit their chances to be directly involved in the reconstruction of their countries” (from an Angolan university study quoted by Visão).

This cornering of the labour market comes about because of the scale of China’s investment, and the willingness of exported Chinese peasants to work for less money than the locals. All over Africa concern is being expressed about the commercial dominance and the political influence of the Chinese Goverment – a recent case from Zimbabwe shows what can happen when a little political influence is brought into play:

Robert Mugabe’s authoritarian regime has chosen to consolidate its recent election victory by bulldozing homes and demolishing markets, leaving vast swathes of the capital and other cities in ruins and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees with neither shelter nor livelihood. Locals are calling it the Zimbabwean tsunami.

“This is Pol Pot style depopulation of cities,” said David Coltart, legal affairs spokesman for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). “It’s a sinister pre-emptive strike designed to remove the maximum possible number of people from urban areas to rural areas where they are easier to control.”

Another suggestion was that the vendors had been cleared out to make way for Chinese traders. China has become Mugabe’s new best friend, supplying commercial and military planes and sending in advisers.

12% of China’s oil comes, astonishingly, from Sudan:

It’s Sudan that’s got the closest links. 60% of its oil exports are now bound for the People’s Republic.

In Darfur, government sponsored militias have driven up to two million people from their homes. Women have been raped, men murdered. But China certainly wasn’t going to support oil sanctions or harsh UN Security Council Resolutions – the resolutions were watered down, so China abstained and didn’t veto.

“We don’t feel any interference in our Sudanese local business, or any of our traditions or politics or beliefs or behaviours. They just devote their time and their energies to their business as we planned for and agreed to.” – Awad Al Jaz, Sudanese energy minister.

The roads the Chinese built to bring in supplies should help the area develop and some people have benefited from electricity extended to their homes. But government attacks forced many more thousands out, as land was cleared of people to make way for oilfields.

The refugees now live in poverty in Khartoum. They have their own perspective on the Chinese.

“Investment is good. It will develop our land, but the most important thing is how we are treated. In the end, the Chinese must go home. This is not their country. Then this will all be ours.” – James Lei (from channel4news.com)

The week following Visão’s report about Portugal’s ‘Return to Angola’, the same magazine published an extensive article about the ‘Chinese Invasion’. It mentioned the growing disquiet among the local population about what is going on:

Despite the good relations between the two countries, in Africa rumours are often taken to be true. It is rumoured that all the Chinese in Luanda have criminal records, that they are to multiply by millions and take jobs from the local population. A recent front-page of the weekly news magazine Folha 8 read ‘Against Development and Employment – the Dangerous Invasion of the Chinese’. (from Visão).

The article ended with a comment from a Portuguese economist, who remarked:

China’s presence in Africa is a long term project.

So, of course, was Portugal’s.

Partido Nacionalista do Brasil (and Germany)

Rich Will1 Comment


According to this, racismo in Brasil is an unbailable crime for which the, well, racist must be imprisoned.

No way the Polícia can have seen any Brazilian TV over the last eight years, then. But just imagine if we had that law here in the UK. We could lock up all the BNP voters! And then burn down the jail and send this dick off to Guantanamo Bay:

Justin Hawkins to release controversial World Cup song

It mentions the war…

The Darkness frontman Justin Hawkins is to release his own World Cup anthem – and it’s bound to prove controversial.

Going up against Embrace’s official Germany 2006 England song ‘World At Your Feet’, Hawkins has previewed his own song, ‘England’, under his solo name British Whale.

The star told The Sun newspaper that he thinks England’s bid for glory is being undermined by political correctness, with people being too scared to mention the Second World War triumph of 1945.

In response, ‘England’ mentions the event in the lyrics.

Hawkins said: “The whole point of an England World Cup song is to assert our national identity and talk about the achievements of a great nation.

“Why can’t we commemorate all those men who gave their lives in the name of freedom in the war? And, of course, in this case – to bash The Hun? It’s a national sport.”

I wonder if he prefers it to football?

Speaking of anti-German racism, I’m actually quite hoping for massive violence from the British contingent in Germany this summer. Not that I’ve got anything against German people, of course, especially as I am one myself – I just can’t wait to see the stuttering reaction from the Sun and the Daily Mail if it all kicks off… Will the headlines be HAVE A GO AT THE KRAUTS or ALL TOGETHER LET’S HAVE A DECEMBER 1914-STYLE TROOCE? Maybe Melanie Phillips will pop up and start complaining that it’s just not politically correct to hate German people any more. And I wonder what the Tommies make of Geoff Hurst‘s admirable campaign for the German National Tourist Office – is he still a National Hero to Sun readers, or is he a sausage-guzzling sunbed-reserving Quisling TRAITOR?!?

By the way, did I mention that I met Caetano Veloso a couple of weeks ago? We shook hands and everything. Now that’s a fucking hero.

Shave Soreditch Shtation!

Rich WillLeave a comment

April 25, 2006, 20:54


I have decided that I am going to Save Shoreditch Station, which, it has been announced, is to close in June. Partly because it’s just so difficult to actually say ‘Save Shoreditch Station!’, but also because I feel somehow that I can. I would be genuinely interested to see what kinds of people would get involved in such a campaign these days these days – especially with the BNP poised to sweep before them the votes of whoever can be bothered to vote next Thursday – and it might be a useful way of getting to know some of the nuttier and some of the more boring locals.

I did use Shoreditch Station once, a few weeks ago, and I must say I was most impressed by how clean and empty it was at 7pm on a Thursday evening. Maybe, in fact, that’s why they want to close it! Hmm. Nevertheless, I am more then pleased that there is a tube line running straight from my house to Brick Lane, and I am quite prepared to stand alone before a bulldozer or a tank and in front of the cameras of the world’s press to save it, even if it does mean that I will never, ever be able to go back to China.

Ahem. On the subject of tube trains, just what the flaming fuck is a ‘Train Destination Describer’? The one at Whitechapel has been out of action for some time, but even when it was working I’m sure it didn’t actually describe the places where the trains end up. I’m willing to bet it never read “This train is for Ealing Broadway, a fairly bland, nondescript stretch of West London with too many Polish people and nowhere particularly nice to go for lunch”, or “This train goes to Wimbledon, which stars Paul Bethany“. Or even “Customers are advised not to board this train, as it is a Hammersmith and City line train and to be honest, guv, you’d be better off walking, alone, through those long, dark, cold rat-filled tunnels”.

I digress. Maybe I should just go and apply for a job with Transport for London. Maybe it, like the National Health Service, is enjoying its best ever year! Ho ho ho. They pay thirty grand, apparently, according to that song. And the perks – special red Oyster cards that glow in the dark, a snazzy yellow jacket and a non-standard accent – are quite remarkable.