rather than opposing the capitalist system they saw the enemy as ‘universalism’

What is interesting about No2EU is the way it poses a challenge to the identity (and post-identity) politics which have become so significant in oppositional thinking for the last quarter century or more. For many radicals the neo-liberal impasse of Thatcherism encouraged a re-evaluation of what progressive politics should be about. Rather than opposing the capitalist system – which looked increasingly impregnable – they saw the enemy as ‘universalism’, of which there were left versions as well as right. Feminism provides the case in point. Launched in the 1960s and 70s, the ‘second wave’ of feminism demanded recognition for women as women, not as women who were adjunct members of the working class. The same was true of black power, and the gay, lesbian and bisexual movements. This new types of identity politics asserted the difference of political subjects against monolithic and exclusive definitions of what it is to be human.

Although these movements were still strongly aligned with the traditional left and the critique of capitalism in the 1970s, a decade later identity politics were becoming increasingly disconnected from socialism. By the late 1990s the new social movements, as they were now called, were strongly libertarian, pluralist and suspicious of any kind of unifying principle concerning what radical politics might be for. The anti-globalisation protests and the series of World Social Forums (WSF) which emerged from them in the 2000s show this very well. Indeed, the collapse of the WSF over the last few years suggests that the strong emphasis on identity, autonomy and plurality has been self-defeating. With no general goals, or programme for achieving them, the new social movements seem to have lost their way.

Still, the demands for recognition and autonomy which drove the new radical politics back in the 70s have not gone away. The challenge now must be to integrate them with the demands of the labour movement. That’s where No2EU, Yes to Democracy comes in. Simultaneously an attack on BNP far right nationalism and the pseudo-cosmopolitanism of the EU, the campaign calls for a Europe where workers’ rights are protected and public services are enhanced rather than cut back and privatised.

The recent strikes at the Lindsey oil refinery suggest that a crucial negotiation has to made here; between the principle of recognising others, in this context workers of other nationalities within the EU, and the need to defend pay and conditions which have been struggled for over many years. The right approach is surely not to say that one simply trumps the other, that the recognition of identity is more important than economic equality or vice versa. Rather it is to show how capitalism conveniently appeals to the recognition of difference (‘workers of whatever nationality have the right to work anywhere in Europe’) while exploiting difference as means of driving down wages across Europe in a race to the bottom. At Lindsey it was workers from impoverished southern Italy who were contracted for well below union negotiated rates.

All this suggests that reconciling difference and identity with demands for social justice is going to involve, above all, the exposure of pernicious ideology. But that’s nothing new. Perhaps two thirds of the struggle of radicals has always consisted in refuting lies and ‘telling truth to power’ as Edward Said once put it.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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The so-called ‘cultural turn’ was driven partly by a theoretical development that was happening throughout the humanities and social sciences. Academics began to take seriously the idea that rather than the world simply existing and then being reflected in language, the world and its objects were produced through language – as well as visual systems like painting and photography. In this new conception, then, what we know stems from what we think, say and represent rather than from the nature of the world ‘out there’. Once this step is taken, the characteristics of the particular culture we inhabit become hugely important, shaping our world. In fact, there is no longer one world, but as many as there are different cultures.

Punk at a demonstration.
[image © copyright BBC]

These developments weren’t only theoretical. Cultural studies was driven too by a radical politics, a sense that huge areas of culture, especially the popular, were treated with contempt and excluded from serious consideration. During the 1970s, pioneering research at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies showed how working class youth – mods, rockers and punks – actively engaged in making meaning and alternative values. A decade later this approach had been extended to the teenage girls who read Jackie magazine, and women viewers of soap operas. Today, all manner of popular cultural activities are the object of study. It would be hard to think of anything that people get up to outside work that hasn’t been redeemed by cultural studies.

I’m not so sure I feel the same way about the field now though. Most of all I doubt the political claims that are still implicit in much cultural studies work. For one thing the cause of ‘reclaiming the popular’ seems to have been won. Popular culture is widely acknowledged, and cultural studies academics have even become media pundits. For another, the politics of popular culture itself now seem rather weak. The recession brings this home. For instance, the democratic implications of reality TV shows like Big Brother look pretty shaky in the light of economic meltdown. Can popular culture really be said to be liberating when you’re out of work and your house has been repossessed?

The return of the material that we’re witnessing has a further aspect I ought to mention. Claims for cultural relativism – the idea that cultures create their own worlds of meaning and value – appear much less certain in hard times when millions of people across the world are facing the same problem, imminent poverty. In other words, the recession helps us to see that human beings have a common existence and face common problems. That doesn’t mean we should abandon the politics of cultural difference and recognition, but it does suggest the need to think in a much more universal way than cultural studies has done so far.

Lastly, I think we need to challenge cultural studies’ hard core constructionism – the idea that what we know is constructed through language and representation. If we’re to make sense of crunch culture we have to bring back reality. This can’t be a naïve version whereby we simply see things for what they are, but a conception of the real which acknowledges complexity, depth and the fact that while society is indeed produced by humans it is by no mean under fair and democratic control.

Anyway, next week I’m going to put my head between the lion’s jaws and make this argument at a symposium on Culture after the Crunch (244k PDF). The other speakers are cultural studies’ luminaries including my OU colleagues John Clarke and Tony Bennett. Grrrrr … .

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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Take the Depression of the 1930s. During this period musicians, film makers and writers documented the devastation caused by capitalism as it leapt off the rails. In the US, popular songs like ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime’, or films such as The Grapes of Wrath, showed the plight of ordinary people thrown out of work or forced to accept starvation wages. Yet for every one of these social realist texts there were hundreds of escapist fantasies, best represented perhaps by the new genre of the screen musical. At RKO studios Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers spent the decade dancing their way through glitzy sets in big dresses, top hat and tails. No poverty here, except through its absence – if the camera was to track across the dance floor and into the street suddenly we’d see all the beggars. Of course we never do.

RKO Studios.
[image by Mark Hinds, some rights reserved]

Jump forward to the present and you wonder how much has changed. Actually, I’d say quite a lot. As my colleague Parvati Raghuram explained in her recent blog about the BBC television show, Strictly Come Dancing, the fantasy of ballroom dancing now has a strong dimension of the ordinary. In other words, the celebrities who battle it out on the dance floor start out as banal, even mediocre, at least in relation to their dancing abilities. As in reality TV more generally what’s at stake is the mediated transformation of ordinariness.

The contrast with Ginger and Fred is that while they too had attributes of the ordinary, the fictional world they inhabited was completely separate from everyday reality. In reality TV, however, a bridge between the ordinary and the sublime is created. We are lured into believing that the apotheosis of everyday life can be achieved just by entering the gates of the media. Politically, this is much more pernicious than a Ginger and Fred film where fantasy remains, well …. fantastic.

Unlike the all-singing, all-dancing musical, reality TV emerged in a time of relative affluence. It’s a pre-crunch genre. So what will happen to it now? My money is on the irruption of real reality. Even though the coming recession is likely to be less extreme in its scale and immediate consequences than the 1930s Depression, the ideological bubble now being burst is a lot bigger. We’ve been told for years that the market provides us with almost unlimited bounty. The shattering of this neoliberal myth will be shocking indeed. I predict the return of documentaries about the hard lives of the millions, dramas with a social conscience, and more scandals concerning the revolting richness of the rich. It’s even possible that rock musicians will write as though they exist in the world itself (rather than in the reflection of a mirror hanging in a suburban bedroom).

Undoubtedly we’ll see more fantasy too, more sublime escape into an imaginary realm. Musicals are probably finished in the West.  But as GDP dives and unemployment soars, it's highly likely that  new popular genres will emerge to carry us through to recovery. Still, there is an alternative. We might just decide to call the whole thing off and abolish capitalism altogether.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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Stock market figures.

Previously we had something called ‘the economy’. This was often problematic and an object of debate. Nevertheless the economy was akin to nature in status. In other words it was an inevitable fact of life which might be measured and analysed by economists and business journalists, but whose essential character remained unchangeable. Neo-liberalism, heralded at the turn of the 1970s as a radical shift in economic thinking and practice hardly challenged this idea. What neo-liberal discourse did do, however, was push the term ‘market’ rather than ‘economy’. It turned out that economies were reducible to markets, whose natural qualities of choice and the maximisation of utility were plain for all to see.

The astonishing thing is how fast all this has changed. Suddenly everyone is using the word capitalism: Gordon Brown, BBC journalists, neo-liberal economists, Republican senators in the US … the list goes on. What’s more there’s a new lexicon to describe the capitalists. For instance, this morning’s Daily Express trumpets, ‘Now city spivs try to wreck HBOS deal’ [the giant HBOS bank is the subject of a takeover bid by its former competitor Lloyds]. In effect the British tabloid press is using the kind of language previously reserved for socialists. I’ve been shouting ‘Make the fat-cats pay’ on our city centre stall for months. It’s uncanny now to hear these slogans echoed in mass circulation newspapers.

Of course that doesn’t mean politicians and the media have suddenly become advocates of radical change. Far from it. The remedies being suggested all focus on small-scale correction or adjustment. Still, the shift in language is hugely significant because it involves a profound distancing effect. Where the market was natural, inevitable and we all had a stake in it, capitalism indicates something historical and thus changeable. More, it suggests a system which is remote from us, even alien.

Perhaps the most important thing about this Discovery of Capitalism is that it shows up how thin and flimsy the ideology of neo-liberalism has been all along. The mantra ‘there is no alternative’ adopted by Margaret Thatcher in the 80s had become a banal statement of common sense by the time of Tony Blair’s arrival as British Prime Minister in 1997. Privatisation and marketisation were now obvious goods. Crucially, all such common sense has been thrown into doubt over the last few weeks. The market system, built on private greed and engendering conflict and inequality, now begins to appear much more as itself.

We might say (please indulge me with this metaphor) that split from breast plate to cod piece the ideological character armour is falling from the shoulders of capitalism. I think that the extent to which media and mainstream politicians can do a repair job and strap it back together depends in part at least on the response of social scientists, both students and academics. Now’s the time to use our skills of critical analysis and investigation to show social reality in all its contradictions and help pave the way for real social change.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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Kingston, Jamaica.
[image by Chrysaora, some rights reserved]

But here we all were, mostly from the global North, staying in uptown hotels or on the beautiful campus beneath the Blue Mountains. Meanwhile downtown in the decaying sprawl of what was once the administrative centre of the British West Indies the poverty stricken people were scuffling to get a crust, or simply survive one more day in streets where mass murder is a fact of everyday life. Indeed, as a recent UN report makes clear gun crime and gang violence in Jamaica have now reached a critical level. In the last five years alone 300 children have been murdered on this tiny island.

It is all too easy to see the problem as a local one. And it’s perfectly true that there is a local dimension. The well off in Jamaica lament the parlous state of the country and then promptly award themselves tax breaks or erect huge security fences to seal off their properties from the ‘sufferahs’ who have nothing. Yet as is the case with inequality everywhere, there’s a structural dimension to this.

Jamaica was once the market garden and dairy of the Caribbean. Then, in the 80s as neo-liberal policies bit, North American agri-business dumped agriculture products (i.e. exported them to the island at below cost) destroying local farms. At the same time the U.S. administration pushed the Jamaican government into wiping out the cultivation of marijuana thus paving the way for the rise of organised crime and a major import/export trade in cocaine from Columbia.

Now what’s left of the economy is controlled by an unholy axis of multinational capitalists and the ‘doms’ or gang bosses who fight each other – and kill hundreds of local people along the way – as they struggle for power over their ‘garrisons’. These are the fiercely protected patches of territory which make up the Kingston metropolitan area. In effect democracy no longer holds sway in this city. Instead politicians collude with gang bosses in a clientelist political system based on corruption and the delivery of votes for favours.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 1970s under the democratic socialism of Michael Manley’s PNP government Jamaica began to move towards a more equitable social order. There was limited public ownership of industry and new welfare programs together with some experiments in radical grass-roots democracy. But towards the second half of the decade, world economic crisis and the new ‘monetarist’ policies of the World Bank and World Trade Organisation did for Jamaican socialism. The economy collapsed and with CIA intervention the bloody election of 1980 (over 1000 killed) brought Edward Seaga and the JLP to power on a neo-liberal ticket. Jamaica has never looked back – though it has never really looked forward either.

Gazing out of my bus as we drove up Orange Street (still the music quarter of this most musical of cities) I wondered what would become of such an extraordinary culture and people. Fatalism is the prevailing mood on the island itself. Yet there are signs of hope in the Caribbean. Looking South to Venezuela it’s possible to see an alternative future. Here was a country also mired in poverty, corruption and the privilege of the wealthy few. Now change is in the air as the Chavez government pushes (albeit very slowly) towards redistribution and a fairer society. The point is, it’s never too late for social change. Or in the terser words of dancehall star Beenie Man we can, we must ‘Reverse De Ting’.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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Sir Alan Sugar.
[photo © copyright]

On screen, Sugar is a highly accomplished performer. He combines the roles of high priest of capital, task master and hanging judge with a certain gruff charm. What’s interesting is that as well as showing his disgust with their incompetence he also demonstrates an ethical stance towards the contestants. Lying and back stabbing, he seems to suggest, really are bad. Yet, just as in establishment politics, so too in the private world of capitalism, vicious self-serving behaviour and mendacity flourish. That’s the danger of The Apprentice then. It serves ideologically to imply that big business is actually OK when really it’s very far from being so. Please, Sir Alan.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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Still, this hasn’t stopped Rowling from taking out a copyright plaint against Stephen Vander Ark in a New York court.

Gavel.
[Image © copyright Photos.com]

Vander Ark, a former school librarian, has run a Harry Potter website for several years which features a Harry Potter lexicon. In the complex world of Potter this has provided the useful service of identifying bizarre characters, fantastic species, and arcane locations. Rowling herself is on record as having used it in her writing. Now, though, Vander Ark has created a print version, released through the small publisher RDR Books. Rowling doesn’t like it and in conjunction with Warner Bros, the studio behind the films of the books, she is suing writer and publisher of the lexicon on the grounds of breach of copyright.

Why does this leave such a bad taste in the mouth? After all, it seems clear enough that Vander Ark has benefited from someone else’s creativity. As Rowling herself put it earlier in the week, the lexicon represents nothing less than the ‘wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work’. And it isn’t just a question of money. The Harry Potter characters, we’re given to understand, are ‘dear as my children’. What Rowling offers here is the classic double rationale for copyright: economic ownership on the one hand, and ‘moral rights’ of the author over her output on the other. As it happens I’m unconvinced by either of these arguments, and remain a strong sceptic about the justification or need for copyright.

Still, whether or not you’re persuaded by full-throated copyright scepticism, certain aspects of the present case surely have worrying implications. Most importantly, we should note that Vander Ark and his publisher are defending themselves on the grounds of ‘fair use’. This is a US term, but a similar provision of ‘fair dealing’ exists in British law, and indeed in most legal systems the world over.

Quite simply, fair use covers all those forms of use of a copyrighted work where the public good has clear priority over the claims of the copyright owner for remuneration and control. Quotation for the purposes of criticism is one of the most obvious examples. Up to a certain limit you can quote what you like without referring to the owner of the copyright in the work from which you’re quoting. Just as well if you’re in my trade – academics in the arts and social sciences would be unable to publish without rights of fair use.

But the same principle must apply for other writers too, in this case someone writing a reference work for a fictional oeuvre. What Vander Ark is doing in his lexicon is nothing less than providing criticism and support in respect of Rowling’s work. This isn’t at all a matter of copying her creations. Rather Vander Ark is discussing them, and helping her readers to boot. Don’t get me wrong. I can’t stand Harry Potter. But I’ll defend to the death the right of anyone to write about the brat.

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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As share prices tumble across the world the pressing question must be, why? Why should there be a 5.5% collapse in value in the space of a single ‘Black Monday’ in the City? The answers are complex of course, and the subject of intense debate. According to one position, catastrophic falls are simply an adjustment (if an extreme one) in a market system that, above all, works. The occasional crisis is simply the price to be paid for a competitive economic regime which is naturally efficient and has produced long term growth and prosperity.

At the critical end of the spectrum, there is an explanation which poses financial crises and full blown recession as endemic. On this view capitalism is contradictory and destructive at its very core, depending as it does on inequality, insecurity and the arbitrary impoverishment of millions of people in times of crisis. Organising economic affairs on the basis of systematic greed, it might reasonably be said, is a recipe for disaster. For what it’s worth I tend to agree with this second position.

Whatever kind of economic analysis is used, though, it’s significant that these explanations remain just that – economic. I think this is too narrow a framework. For one thing, it doesn’t say anything about the immediate subjective factors that trigger a financial crash, make it persist or indeed come to an end. What matters here is what’s going in the minds of financial traders, how they feel as buyers and sellers of stocks and shares. Indeed, during a financial crisis it suddenly becomes clear that the whole system depends on confidence. And when that disappears traders simply follow one another downwards in a circle of fear and uncertainty. ‘Sell! Sell! Sell! ‘ they yell.

Media studies can shed light on this phenomenon. At the turn of the 1960s Stanley Cohen suggested that in portraying the seaside street battles of British youth – the mods and rockers – the media came to represent them as ‘folk devils’. This produced a ‘moral panic’ in society at large, to which the media responded by going further in its representation of bad behaviour. Soon the youth themselves were playing up to the images in the press and television. Cohen called this process, the ‘media amplification spiral’.

Something similar is surely at work among City dealers who not only watch colleagues around them, but see media reports on the activities of fellow wheelers and dealers across the world. Sure enough, on BBC news last night I watched a designer-suited and booted gaggle emerging from their offices at dusk. So young, so angry, so frightened – this could have been a group of mods on the run at Margate, Bank Holiday, 1964. In fact I was witnessing quite a different kind of youth subculture, one whose fear and anxiety is focused on share prices and the state of their performance related bonuses. Today, as the descent continued I couldn’t help thinking that Cohen’s model fits all too well.

What to do? The new standard method for dealing with wayward youth is of course the ASBO. Which prompts the thought: might not capitalism be reformed by means of an anti-social behaviour order? Why can’t we slap one on those boy traders – keep them at home till all the financial foolishness blows over?

About the author

Jason Toynbee is Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at The Open University. His research interests are in creativity, copyright, and ethnicity - mainly through music - and his new book, Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World? is just out.

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