Sidewinder

Magyar madness! It’ll never catch on… Short english language article about first night on hungarian indymedia. Good wikipedia coverage. Despite the inherent humour of people rioting against a politician telling the truth for possibly the first time in recorded history : "…we fucked up. Not a little, a lot. No European country has done something as boneheaded as we have. Evidently, we lied throughout the last year-and-a-half, two years. It was totally clear that what we are saying is not true." Gyurcsány Ferenc, Hungarian PM - the situation in Hungary remains volatile. Not a few commentators are accusing Ferenc of being the source of the leak in order to provoke a crisis that will allow him to crack down and impose neo-liberal "reforms". Despite the prevalence of nationalist and right wing elements in the streetplay, the game is about an attempt to impose an IMF agenda on Hungarians. Lest we forget this is what Milosevic was trying to do in 1990 when the resulting virtual collapse of the Serbian state (when the police sent to attack striking unpaid public workers themselves went on strike because they hadn’t been paid either) led into the nationalist turn and war. Watch this space, this could get messy.

…or not, as the case may be. [sound of wind whistling through deserted streets… tumbleweed blowing past… a dark shrouded figure with scythe stands silhouetted in doorway whilst entirety of world leaders gathered at UN examine their fingernails, twiddle thumbs or look up at the ceiling whistling silently]

(with apologies to the Dead Kennedys). I am not in the habit of
reading or paying any attention to papal pronouncements. However the
latest hoo-ha about possible insults to islam in his speech at
Regensburg led me to have a look at the full text.

The theme of the speech is on (christian) faith and reason - not
reason as we know it but reason "liberated" from the narrow
Cartesian/empiricist definition imposed on it by modern science. In
other words it’s utter bollocks and intellectually pretty feeble fare
a that. A further measure of the basic stupidity of this man is that
the offending quote from the long-dead byzantine emperor which has
been the spark for much emoting in the muslim world - "Show me just
what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things
only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the
faith he preached" - is in fact completely irrelevant to the theme of
the speech and yet the man was too brain-dead to realise the political
impact him speaking this phrase would have. Frankly you wouldn’t trust
the guy with the TV remote.

However, despite the immense chutzpah of the Pope denouncing the
unreasonable spreading of religion by fire and sword as something only
those nasty muslims do (the words pot and kettle come to mind). The
deeper agenda of bigotry is perhaps visible in the following quote
from the same speech

"This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek
philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only
from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of
world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given
this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its
origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on
its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express
this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent
addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the
foundation of what can rightly be called Europe."

Well we can certainly see where yer man’s opposition to Turkey’s
joining the EU is coming from. Europe and, by extension, "the West" is
based on an intellectual tradition exclusively grounded in
christianity. Let us remind ourselves of the real historical lessons
of El Andalus - the intellectual and technological development of
Western Europe is very much the joint historical product of the
inter-relation of "the Three Cultures" - that is Islamic, Jewish and
Christian (and even this is already an over-simplification). For this
ex-Hitler Jugend, the contributions of the other 2 cultures are to be
removed from history. This is naked historical revisionism on the
level of cultural genocide - at least the muslims are mentioned (in
the mode of being attacked) of the Jewish contribution to European
history though - nothing, nada, zip. It is as if the Pope’s former
fuhrer had been successful in entirely erasing Jewish life, history
and culture from the face of Europe.

In many ways it could be argued there’s no point getting worked up
about what is, after all, fairly traditional church positions. It’s
just that in the decades following the church’s involvement with the
Third Reich’s holocaust, some efforts were made to tone down or cover
up the cultural negationism of some of its positions. However, it now
seems that so long as the church can be seen as engaged on the "right"
side in the current neo-con led anti-Islamic crusade, the fundamental
anti-semitism of these same positions will be blythely overlooked in
the wider cause of muslim-bashing.

Pleasant enough day, thought I’d mosey on down to our local social centre and take a look at some of the films and talks on offer. The theme was mostly greenish as it was a follow-up to the recent climate camp. Amongst the films on offer I was particularly struck by the one about Jeffrey "Free" Luers case. I’d seen Free’s name on a number of prisoner support lists before but knew little about his case, also, to be honest, the his classification as an "Earth Liberation" prisoner was a bit of a turn off for me given that it tends to be associated in my mind with reactionary trends like deep ecology and primitivism. Having seen the film though, I’m totally in support of the campaign for his freedom and it’s given me a kick up the arse to sort my prisoner support agenda out again, which is about time really.

At the beginning of the 20th Century the Austrian mathematician and
Logician Kurt Goedel put the cat amongst the philosophical pigeons by
demonstrating a formal truth that for any closed system it was
possible to determine a proposition that was undecideable by that
system - i.e. that the system could not determine the validity or
invalidity of. For the sake of argument, I call the amount of these
undecideable propositions, in proportion to the decideable ones, the
"Goedality" of a given system. In mathematics the struggle has always
be to reduce the Goedality of the mathematical system (indeed the holy
grail for several thousand years has been to eliminate it entirely -
this is why Goedel’s Incompleteness theorem came as a bit of a blow,
to put it mildly).

However outside the world of mathematics there are other systems where
the trend seems to be in the opposite direction. That is that there
are systems which people are evolving in the direction of increasing
the Goedality of the system - i.e. to increase the amount and
proportion of undecideable propositions. The extreme case is a system
where virtually all of the propositions are undecideable or there are
several equally valid results for any given determination - this is a
"hyper-goedelised" system. Why would anybody deliberately want to do
this?

Consider the benefits system. For decades people who do benefits
advice have known that the benefits legislation is overly complex and
incoherent, such that benefits staff will make a determination that a
given person is due little or no benefits - advice workers can then
use the same legislation to determine that the same person is due
substantially more. At this point the easy way out is to just dismiss
it as the incompetence of bureacracy, but I think not. Consider that
successive governments, rather than attempting to reform and simplify
the benefits system - i.e. to reduce its goedality - instead continue
to complexify it by adding more and more inconsistent rules or
axioms. One could put this down as an effect of political-bureacratic
entropy - each new political master wishes to make his or her mark
(and gain media coverage) by making new initiatives - but the evidence
suggests that there is more to it.

I propose that the continuing hyper-goedelisation of the benefits
system is a deliberate strategy by the administration. On the one hand
complicated systems increase the amount of unclaimed benefits by
people unempowered to navigate the forbidding complexity of the
system’s rules - secondly it allows the system to operate in a
"legalistic" fashion. That is to say that the state does not calculate
levels of payment due, it makes a "case" for a level of payment (as
low as possible) which then must be challenged by making a
counter-case, all of which takes time and energy.

All of which is to say that there is no point expecting the
administration in toto (individual politicians may pay some interest,
but they have less power than people suppose) to look on a proposal to
simplify, rationalise or "de-goedelise" the benefits system as a
positive one. The context of the class struggle is the hidden
rationality behind the surface irrationalities that continually
perplex and frustrate the people who judge the efficiencies of any
given sub-system purely within its own framework

The world changed in 1921, as much in Detroit as Kronstadt. In that
year the doctrine of the genius of the designer had to cede to the
desire of the consumer. This event happened in a specific place and
industry, that of the nascent automobile industry of the USA, centred
around Detroit. The US nascent US automobile industry had, like the
rest of manufacturing industry, diverted a substantial amount of
production from civilian to military ends during the First World
War. The post-war boom in demand had seen automotive output grow to
its highest levels yet achieved with the number of firms engaged in
car production reaching its all time peak of about 75 firms. However,
the post-war boom was quickly followed, in 1920 and 1921 with a severe
depression. Although short-lived, the depression of 1920-21 saw a more
precipitous fall in prices and employment than the subsequent and
infinitely more famous depression of 1929-33. Within the space of a
year prices fell between 50 and 60% - the most sudden and severe fall
in recorded economic history before or since. Exact unemployment
figures were not recorded at the time but the best estimate from
available figures is that unemployment surged from 2-3% up to about
12%, before returning back to 2-3% the following year. This brief but
savage slump saw awathes of American automobile manufaturers either go
to the wall or be swallowed up in mergers. Within two years a third of
the industry had gone and the after-effects left the industry down
from 75 to 35 players within a few more years. During this period the
sales of nearly all lines of cars declined drastically - all that is,
apart from a small number of makes that had closed bodies.

Evolving from horse-drawn carriages, most automobile bodywork had
retained a carriage-like configuration of open-bodied "touring cars"
with convertible tops such as Ford’s Model T sported. The closed body
carriagework had been first introduced by Cadillac but it’s value was
hotly debated by engineers, not least Ford himself. Prior to 1921 a
consensus had been reached amongst the engineers and manufacturers
that the closed body was a pointless, unnecessarily expensive,
flash-in-the-pan fad. The fact that those manufacturers who had gone
against the consensus to offer closed body cars to the public were the
only ones to see sales grow in the middle of the disastrous slump,
fundamentally changed the automobile industry in the first instance
and was ultimately to transform the whole of capitalist manufacturing
and business. The era of "You can have any colour you want, so long as
it’s black" was definitively over.

Another effect of the crisis of 1921 was to finally confirm the
passing of operational control of General Motors to the man who was to
become Henry Ford’s nemesis and, in many ways, the true father of our
modern era, Alfred Pritchard Sloan.

Unlike Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan was not an engineer or designer of
automobiles. Rather he was a true capitalist, a genius innovator in
the fields of corporate management and governance and marketing. Sloan
had been a director of a bearings manufacturer that had been bought up
by William Durant, the flawed but brilliant deal-maker extraordinare
who initially out General Motors together but was, ultimately unable
to sustainably run the corporate monster he had created. When the du
Ponts bought out Durant to protect their investment, they saw the
skills of Sloan and quickly pushed him to the fore.

Sloan’s inherited a car firm that was an aggregation of different
sites producing different models of cars, in comparison to Ford’s
unitary product and production facilities. Sloan’s innovations, which
were to allow General Motors to overtake Ford in volume of car sales
and become the largest automobile manufacture in the world, were in 3
main areas.

1. What Sloan called "the breaking down of the mass market, into a
   mass class market". Rather than allowing the five different vehicle
   lines that GM possessed to compete against each other, Sloan
   segmented the consumer market and assigned each line a different
   section. One for the starting out, young, single driver with no
   kids and limited funds, from which the consumer could progress to
   the sportier market, having gained a higher wage, then progressing
   to the family car as they married and produced kids, and so on, up
   to the luxury market with the Cadillac for the well-to-do. In
   association with this strategy Sloan introduced segment-specific
   targetted, aspirational marketting, with the first use of road-side
   bill boards alongside other more traditional advertising outlets.

2. In contrast to Ford’s violent opposition to credit, Sloan
   introduced the first provision of consumer credit for consumer
   durables - credit for the masses had previously been limited to
   land and built property only. Sloan’s consumer credit service
   allowed buyers to purchase the Chevrolets or Pontiacs they would
   not have been able to buy outright.

Both of which tied into the third innovation:

3. The annual model change. The idea of the annual model change was to
   entice the consumers that already had functioning cars to replace
   them (with the help of consumer credit) with this years new
   model. The logic of the annual model change - enough new features
   to make the new model more desireable than the old, but not too
   much change to threaten the consumer’s confidence in the new car’s
   re-sale value - was all laid out by Sloan.

The point of all of this innovation was to overcome the crisis of
over-production that Ford was rapidly running into. Ford’s Model T had
opened a new mass market of people who had never had cars before,
however by the mid-20s just about everybody in the USA who wanted a
Model T had one. What’s more they didn’t wear out that much and there
were plenty of spares and second-hand models available too. In this
sense Ford must be seen as a transitional figure, corresponding to the
opening up of the market, and Sloan as the mature capitalist,
overcoming the initial limit of the market by selling new cars to
people who already had cars. Sloan renegotiated the relation between
producer and consumer as regards the design or use value of the
car. If the consumers wanted closed body cars then GM (whose Cadillac
subsidiary had first introduced the closed body car in its Model
Thirty) would provide them, regardless of the prevailing consensus
amongst the professional engineers, conviced that they "knew
best". Following Massimo De Angelis thesis that capital overcomes
limits by operations of new enclosures, we could say that this
operation corresponds to the enclosure of some aspects of the
subjectivity of the consumers, in their production of desired use
values.

Ford the dominant figure of the transitional phase of the growth of
the motor industry from a small luxury market to a mass market. As
such, he represents the "heroic" era of the despotism of the engineer
over the intended use value of the product. Ford was absolutely
assured that he knew best, and this for him naturally extended from
the design of cars to the micro-managing of the lifestyles of his
workers and the running of society itself. Hence why this profoundly
sinister, fascistic and ravingly anti-semitic self-publicist became
the hero and idol of all the adherents of social despotism and
totalitarianism from Hitler, Mussolini to Stalin, as well as
fascinating Lenin, Trotsky and Gramsci. But the myopic vision of
political authoritarians, both of the left and the right, have
occluded the extent to which Alfred Sloan, not Henry Ford is the true
father of the modern consumer capitalist social order. In so doing
they have introduced the misleading periodisation of Fordism and
Post-Fordism into left analytical discourse. Look at the tropes of
post-modernism - the continual segmenting of the consumer into
ever-burgeoning and differentiated ideal types for example - is all
this already not present in the innovations of Sloan’s breaking the
mass market into the "mass class market" and associated advertising?
Consider Maurizio Lazzarato’s comments in his piece on "Immaterial
Labour":

"The postindustrial enterprise and economy are founded on the
manipulation of information. Rather than ensuring (as
nineteenth-century enterprises did) the surveillance of the inner
workings of the production process and the supervision of the markets
of raw materials (labor included), business is focused on the terrain
outside of the production process: sales and the relationship with the
consumer. It always leans more toward commercialization and financing
than toward production. Prior to being manufactured, a product must be
sold, even in "heavy" industries such as automobile manufacturing; a
car is put into production only after the sales network orders
it. This strategy is based on the production and consumption of
information. It mobilizes important communication and marketing
strategies in order to gather information (recognizing the tendencies
of the market) and circulate it (constructing a market). In the
Taylorist and Fordist systems of production, by introducing the mass
consumption of standardized commodities, Ford could still say that the
consumer has the choice between one black model T5 and another black
model T5. "Today the standard commodity is no longer the recipe to
success, and the automobile industry itself, which used to be the
champion of the great ‘low price’ series, would want to boast about
having become a neoindustry of singularization"—and quality. For the
majority of businesses, survival involves the permanent search for new
commercial openings that lead to the identification of always more
ample or differentiated product lines. Innovation is no longer
sub­ordinated only to the rationalization of labor, but also to
commercial imperatives. It seems, then, that the postindustrial
commodity is the result of a creative process that involves both the
producer and the consumer."

Is this not simply the description of the development of the regime of
strategies that Sloan introduced in the 1920’s?

For unleashing yet another blog onto an already overloaded infosphere? For some long time I have resisted the idea as a personal capitulation to the vagaries of fashion or, worse still, an onanist exercise in self-importance. The reason I’ve overcome these negative attitudes are simple:

• I need somewhere relatively persistent to make texts and fragments online with minimal administrative overhead.
• Preferably with some element of browser-based feedback possibility
• Somewhere where I can mix a stream of pretty diverse commentary, ramblings, obscure political and theoretical knot-tying without being off-topic to any wider context set by somebody else’s site.

So, I guess it’s time to teach myself to use a blogging interface. The character of this site will become evident over time as postings accumulate, I define my categories and record my links.