A Face in the Crowd

Anna Chen (aka Madame Miaow) has criticised Ken Loach for the absence of non-white faces in his film on the foundation of the welfare state, The Spirit of '45. I've no dispute with Anna's central claim, that "people of colour like me have been painted out of working-class history", but I was struck by her characterisation of Loach's defence of his choice of material ("That's the record of the time") as an "airy dismissal".

It should hardly need saying that an edited film is necessarily selective, but there are two levels of selection at work when you employ archive footage. There is the selection bias of the film-maker, such as Loach, who chooses images that best support and convey his argument; but there is also the bias of the original film-maker, which, in this context, might involve ignoring non-whites or focusing on them only as exotica. There is also a third level, the structural bias of film-making itself. A good example of this can be found in the Mitchell and Kenyon archive of urban scenes from the early 1900s. These films were shot to capture as many people as possible, often exiting factory gates, in order to drum up business for a showing at a subsequent fair. This approach, and the unselfconscious nature of the crowds, produced images closer to real life than would be the case with later newsreels, which is why the archive is now of such value to historians.

One striking example of this is a 45 second reel of miners leaving Pendlebury Colliery, on the outskirts of Manchester, around 1900. At 35 seconds in, a young black man can be seen joshing with a young white colleague. Neither they, nor another young white man who appears slightly ahead of them and seems to be part of the same group, look like miners knocking off from a shift (their faces are clean and they wear white shirts). They look like factory workers who've strolled into shot as part of a dare. What's noticeable is that no one seems to consider the black guy as unusual. He was presumably a familiar face in the area. This reinforces Anna's point that non-white workers were far more prevalent than most films (and many histories) imply, though it thereby also indicates the degree of selectivity at work in most films and thus the problems faced by later users of the material like Loach. Mitchell and Kenyon weren't trying to record a slice of Mancunian life, and therefore tempted to film only what matched their prejudices. They were simply letting the camera run to capture as many faces as possible.

To what degree should a film-maker adjust for prior selection bias, "to suit our present sensitivities" as Loach put it, when using archive material? In his selection of footage, Loach may well be guilty of subconscious bias, seeking out images from the 1940s when we were "at our best", and this may result in too many happy, shiny, white Labour voters. His use of rare colour stock to make the 1940s feel closer to the present, along with his use of montage (the abrupt jump from 1945 to 1979), indicate that this is a polemic, not an accurate record of the times. The Spirit of '45 is not a forensic depiction of the working class, but an attempt to poetically recapture the collectivist and generous spirit of the age, which though popular was not shared by all (David Kynaston's Austerity Britain 1945-51 is excellent on this truth). Bonnie Greer praised the film on Late Review back in March precisely for trying to recapture the feeling of the times. It might be more accurate to say that Loach's purpose is to make us identify with those who were true believers then. In that sense, the film is exemplary as well as didactic.

In recalling the spirit of 1945, Loach is attempting to provide a historical basis for the modern defence of the welfare state. The target is not merely the stealth-privatisation of the NHS, but the ideological war of attrition against collective action since the 1970s. But the slow decline of collective action is also the product of other socio-economic forces, part of which has been the increase in cultural diversity and the growth of single-issue (or commodity) politics. Anna's critique is thus of its time in the same way as Loach's film seeks to be of an earlier time.

Scoubidou and the Protestant Work Ethic

The debate around the presumed inevitability of a basic income is beginning to ramp up. Expect a Horizon or Newsnight special sometime soon. The fundamental premise is that late capitalism cannot provide full employment in an advanced economy, largely because technology substitutes capital for labour (automation) and simultaneously leads to commodity deflation ("the coming abundance"). This pincer movement makes more and more people surplus to requirements as labour, but maintains their usefulness as consumers, assuming basic commodities remain within their reach.

We have now reached a point in history where capital, the inventory of surplus value, is so large it struggles to find opportunities for further productive investment. Simultaneously, the number of people needed to keep growing that inventory is declining due to continuing productivity gains. Some argue that the growth in value over the last 30 years is mainly due to a massive expansion in productive (i.e. non-subsistence) labour through the process of globalisation and trade liberalisation, but I'm of the school that thinks the main driver has been technology. Double-digit Chinese growth rates were less the product of farmers becoming industrial workers and more the improved productivity of Chinese industry. The growing surplus of labour we see in advanced economies will eventually appear in the developing economies too.

In such a world, where an increasing minority are denied the opportunity of a job, and thus access to wealth, we put democracy in jeopardy (the Chinese may be playing a long game by constraining democracy now). If we are to preserve a society based on the ideals of merit and equality of opportunity, then we must either more equitably share work or we must pay people not to work. In reality, a subsidy is a better solution for the rich, i.e. those who own capital now, than ceding their relative monopoly over the shrinking pool of future jobs. Despite the hurdles of intern programmes and professional closed shops, sharing work would mean sharing access to wealth.

The main subsidy options being considered are the job guarantee and the basic income. The former means providing work when the market cannot, not unlike the old idea of outdoor relief. Pro-social work (digging ditches, tidying-up parks) is provided by the state until such time as the private sector can deliver full employment again. The latter means providing everyone (i.e. all citizens of the state) with an unconditional income, independent of employment. For people who work, tax would be applied only on their additional income. A job guarantee attempts to address a surplus of labour. A citizen's basic income attempts to address a surplus of wealth.

The job guarantee is popular among Moden Monetary Theory (MMT) and post-Keynsian economists, who argue that governments have the means to achieve full employment without high inflation. However, the popularity of the job guarantee concept among social democrats and neoliberals is more to do with traditional notions of the disciplining of labour: not leaving "hands idle" and government as the employer of last resort. The basic income has historically been more popular among the libertarian left, as it assumes that individuals should be allowed to decide on their level of labour contribution. Despite evidence of its practicality and hidden benefits (e.g. the spur to innovation and entrepreneurship), the basic income tends to be dismissed as hippy madness that would produce a nation of couch potatoes, rather than fit workers trained for trench warfare.

A fundamental difference between the two is that the job guarantee is paid at a sufficiently low wage to encourage migration to private-sector jobs once the economy improves. In other words, slightly less than the minimum wage. It does not necessarily require coercion, in the sense of obliging everyone to work, but there is an obvious tendency towards the labour battalion given the poverty wages and the manual bias of much of the work. The chief modern argument against the job guarantee is that it is based on traditional assumptions about cyclicality: the periodic move from full employment to unemployment and back again. It does not address secular trends in respect of automation and commodity deflation, and is thus guilty of  "fighting the last war", being more appropriate as a response to the temporary depressions of the 20th century than the structural unemployment of the 21st.

In contrast, the basic income provides a mechanism to transition to a world where most labour is surplus to requirements, either in terms of specific individuals or a gradual reduction in the working week. A basic income also has the potential to be redistributive. Whereas a job guarantee wage will always gravitate to the lowest level, a basic income can be gradually increased to reflect two "social dividends": the gradual reduction in average working time, and the growth of GDP. In other words, the growth in wealth due to productivity could be more equitably distributed, rather than being disproportionately captured by owners of capital. A basic income thus creates a positive tension with the distribution of work, and thus wealth, whereas a job guarantee is concerned with temporary alleviation only and is deliberately parsimonious.

The current obsession with "skivers" may prove to be the last hurrah before the introduction of some form of income subsidy (the "universal benefit" is obviously suggestive). The suspicion must be that workfare will gradually evolve into a job guarantee - i.e. the left will pitch it as "the right to work" while the right will revert to the Biblical "he who does not work, neither shall he eat", and both will bang on about the need to cultivate a "work ethic". The problem is that such moralistic coercion will become increasingly pointless as jobs disappear and more and more "strivers" are sucked into its scope. Indeed, there is a strong argument that we'd do better to encourage a "workshyness ethic". The suspicion is that the job guarantee will mutate in the medium term into permanent boondoggles [*] and mere gestures, not unlike the ritual of signing-on.

That said, the job guarantee (and the work ethic) makes perfect sense if your goal is to defend current wealth inequalities, though it can only be a delaying tactic. Eventually, it will evolve into voluntary work and an unconditional basic income. The real prize will be to ensure that the latter is kept sufficiently low to ensure that productivity gains disproportionately accrue to the owners of capital. Over the coming years, we can expect neoliberal ideology to frame the basic income as "Utopian" and the job guarantee as "pragmatic".

[* - In the US, the term "boondoggle" is used both for pointless projects (it originated in the use of handcraft courses as temporary job creation during the New Deal) and for Scoubidou, the pastime of plaiting and knotting key-rings and other knick-knacks using leather strips or colourful plastic tubes.]

The Return of the Bubble Car

The driverless car meme has started to evolve in some interesting ways. After the simple joys of the robot chauffeur, the predictions of the future are now starting to focus on the real estate potential and the remodelling of the urban landscape. Much of the speculation is nonsense, but the claims made are indirectly revealing. A good example is an article in the New York Times this week entitled Disruptions: How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities.

Amusing claim number one: "Inner-city parking lots could become parks". The theory behind this is that autonomous vehicles, probably shared on-demand ones (i.e. Zipcar with added robot chauffeur), would deliver us to the doors of our city-centre offices and then whizz off to some remote corral, returning promptly at 5 to pick us up. It's a bit like the London Bike Scheme, but without the need to find a docking station that hasn't already been emptied. The implicit extra travel burden is easily dealt with: "Though this would increase miles driven, and thus conceivably increase gas used and congestion, driverless cars will be so efficient there may not be an increase in congestion or gas consumption". I wouldn't bother asking to see the data that backs that claim up.

Bonkers claim number two: "[The] city of the future could have narrower streets because parking spots would no longer be necessary". Where roads were laid out before mass car-ownership, parking often makes the street too narrow. Remove the parking and you would allow cars to move freely in both directions. That's a clear benefit, but one that would be promptly lost by narrowing the street. As cars stop to make deliveries, or allow passengers to alight, the flow of traffic would be halted, much as it is today. There is an argument to be made that high land values in the centre of cities would encourage the conversion of street parking - i.e. offices and shops could expand a bit - but this assumes there are lots of parking bays in situ. The higher the value of the land today, the less likely this is to be true (e.g. New Bond Street or Fifth Avenue). The big development opportunity in city centres would be to demolish and replace multi-storey car parks. In other words, they won't become parks, they'll become office blocks or flats.

Dubious claim number three: "If parking on city streets is reduced and other vehicles on roadways become smaller, homes and offices will take up that space. Today’s big-box stores and shopping malls require immense areas for parking, but without those needs, they could move further into cities". Suburban malls and retail parks work on the principle that you, the customer, will make the deliveries. With autonomous vehicles, you could schlep over to the mall and back in an on-demand car, but you could just as easily order online and have the car deliver the goods to you. The suggestion that driverless cars might arrest the decline of the high street is just an attempt to dream up pro-social benefits for what is an anti-social development. The really transformative potential of driverless cars is to turn suburban malls into "dark stores".

Worrying claim number four: "Traffic lights could be less common because hidden sensors in cars and streets coordinate traffic. And, yes, parking tickets could become a rarity since cars would be smart enough to know where they are not supposed to be". Given the pioneering work in this field by Google, and bearing in mind the recent Prism revelations, it should be obvious that driverless cars are an invasion of privacy on wheels. Not only will the car know where it is "not supposed to be", it will know precisely where you have been and where you are entitled to go. Strangely, none of the cheerleaders for driverless cars have mentioned the impact on crime, e.g. the obsolesence of the getaway driver and the joyrider. Autonomous cars mean a reduction in personal autonomy and an increase in system control. While there are genuine benefits to this, such as efficiency of travel and reduced accidents, the potential for the state to over-step the mark should be obvious.

If that sounds a touch paranoid, consider Tyler Cowen's views (common among right-wing economists) on the need for parking spaces to be charged at a realistic (i.e. expensive) market rate. Though his argument is couched in anti-subsidy and pro-environmental terms, what he's essentially proposing is that city-centre parking be the preserve of the rich. When Westminster Council tried to introduce charges for hitherto free evening and weekend parking, this was widely interpreted as an attempt to raise revenue to offset central government cuts. In fact, the gradual restriction of parking and the increase in charges has been a long-term trend under governments of both left and right, variously sold as pro-public transport and pro-environment. Parking is increasingly framed as a privilege, not as a right (a well-worn false dichotomy of neoliberalism).

Revealing claim number five: "driverless cars will allow people to live farther from their offices and that the car could become an extension of home. I could sleep in my driverless car, or have an exercise bike in the back of the car to work out on the way to work". This gets to the nub of the matter. The "car" that is envisaged here is clearly closer to a Winnebago, with bathroom and diner, despite the previous claims that pool cars will typically be smaller (as most trips involve only one or two passengers). As an "extension of home", it should be seen as just another property - a mobile pied-a-terre. There is no suggestion that this sort of convenience will be extended to those who don't work in city-centre offices, or who do manual jobs that don't necessitate recourse to an exercise bike.

As I've previously noted, the economics of driverless cars require that they be mandated by law if the major benefits are to be realised. This would be difficult to enforce nationally at a stroke, so I suspect the most likely scenario is that they first become mandatory within a city's limits. This will create a de facto border zone, opening up possibilities for the control of movement into and out of the heart of the metropolis, as well as commercial opportunities for transhipments and tolls. I imagine Boris Johnson will see some upside to this. Congestion charging and the bike scheme have familiarised us with the concept of transport zoning in London at precisely the same time that the centre of the city has morphed into an enclave for the wealthy. The domain of the robot chauffeur is already taking shape between Fulham and Shoreditch.

Many city-dwellers will find they can no longer afford their own car and will instead be obliged to use pool cars. This will be sold as a positive lifestyle choice, with the environmental benefits to the fore. With the potential for car platoons during commutes, it's possible that autonomous vehicles might in time substitute for trams and light-rail trains, and perhaps even the underground (without the need for large gaps between trains, the same passenger numbers could be transported in greater comfort and privacy). Society will be further atomised - the bubble of ear-buds and book replaced by bubble cars.

Contingent Democracy

Despite their proximity, I've yet to see anyone draw parallels between the coup d'etat in Egypt and the shenanigans in the Falkirk Constituency Labour Party, so I will. Once upon a time, the Forth and Clyde Canal, which runs through Falkirk, allowed ships to transfer between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde, thus avoiding the need to sail around the North of Scotland. It's not quite on a par with the Suez Canal, but no mean engineering feat either. But that's enough about canals. The more interesting contrast relates to the practice of democracy.

The embarrassed silence of Western governments over the military intervention in Cairo (beyond peace-n-love anodynes) has been widely interpreted as sympathy for "our side", the secular liberal middle class. The implication is that the West cannot help itself in displaying this prejudice - we're only human after all - and that liberals everywhere should simply hope for the best as the alternative (the mad mullahs) remains too objectionable.

Apart from the obvious hypocrisy, this looks strategically foolish as the Muslim Brotherhood clearly enjoy majority support outside of the metropolis, much as the AKP does in Turkey outside of Istanbul. What happens if the electorate fails to deliver the "right" result at the promised (but unscheduled) election? To quote Bertolt Brecht "would it not be be simpler if the government simply dissolved the people and elected another?"

In Cairo, the protestors' charges against Morsi centred on broken promises, economic incompetence and favouritism. These could be levelled at many democratically-elected governments, such as the UK coalition (student fees, stagnation, creeping privatisation etc). As the idea that representative democracies should have the power of recall remains alien in the UK, the dominant narrative in the British media that explains (and justifies) the current rebellion is that Morsi pursued a majoritarian approach that verged on a "constitutional coup". In plain terms, democracy is more than one person, one vote.

This hinterland of democracy is described using flexible terms such as pluralism, tolerance and inclusivity. Of course, the failure of pluralism was as much the fault of the opposition as the Muslim Brotherhood, which has in turn fed the casually racist debate in some parts of the media as to whether Arabs are capable of "doing democracy" (imagine if the Daily Telegraph wrote an editorial suggesting the same crippling deficiency in the Scots). The demands for pluralism now are partly defensive appeals for sectarian tolerance (for the Copts and the small Shia community) but largely a demand that politics be conducted within a narrow spectrum acceptable to liberals. This is consistent with the more subtle coup of neoliberalism in Western democracies, where large areas of political debate have been ruled "beyond dispute" (the free market) or "inconceivable" (workplace democracy).

The army's promise that it will appoint an interim technocratic government pending elections is clearly intended to reassure the West that normal business will shortly be resumed and due proprieties observed. The deployment of the adjective "technocratic" deliberately echoes the Monti interregnum in Italy. The Labour Party's decision to refer l'affaire Falkirk to the Scottish police has much the same purpose: a show of propriety and an appeal to an independent arbiter (this would have been more problematic if the constituency was in London and under the jurisdiction of the Met).

The fuss over Falkirk has predictably produced mutterings about Militant entryism in the 80s and the ridiculous claim that the soft left Unite union is conspiring to dominate the Labour party. In the UK, one-person-one-vote has long been the preferred stick with which to beat the unions. Bloc representation, which is a perfectly respectable democratic practice (after all, MP's represent blocs of voters with widely differing views), is routinely denigrated as anti-democratic. In plain terms, democracy is no more than one person, one vote.

Regardless of the specific abuses in the Falkirk case (which we don't really know about as the "report" remains embargoed), what is noticeable is the ready recourse to the trope of union members as mindless ballot-fodder. You'd expect this lurid depiction from the Tories, but much of it has come from the Blairites who presumably remain "relaxed" about New Labour being primarily dependent on rich business donors. Falkirk is interpreted as a culture clash, with Unite determined to advance working-class, pro-union candidates at the expense of middle-class, neoliberal cuckoos. This is as misleading simplistic as the representation of the Egyptian crisis as a clash between Islamists and secularists, but if it were true, then encouraging more working class MPs would surely be in the interests of pluralism.

What this highlights is a well-worn truth. Pluralism is always advanced from a liberal perspective because it is simply an aspect of liberal practice: the informal division of the spoils. But it rests on the assumption that plural society does not include everyone, only those who ultimately subscribe to liberal values and abide by the rules of the game. This means that there are always some who are beyond the pale, such as Islamists and trade unionists, for whom "democratic rights" are contingent.

Aerotropolis Now

I spent last weekend in Berlin, or, to be more precise, I spent a slow Friday night in Gatwick airport and then spent the next two days in the German capital trying to catch up on lost sleep. A five hour delay, due to a crocked Easyjet plane, meant that we didn't get our heads down till 4am on Saturday. This would have been fine if we'd been clubbing, but our itinerary was geared to early breakfasts and tramping the city streets. The delay meant an opportunity to experience the emerging airport city of Greater Crawley, courtesy of two £6 a head food vouchers from Easyjet. I did toy with the idea of blowing it all on a couple of oysters in the Caviar House & Prunier seafood bar, where I noticed John Moulton ensconced, but opted instead for steak and chips and a bottle of Cahors in Café Rouge. Naturally, the £6 barely covered the chips.

The aerotroplis trope - the city built around an airport - has been around for a while now, though outside of artificially sustained oases like Dubai there is scant evidence of the successful evolution of airports into destinations in their own right; all this despite the attempts to recreate the nineteenth century arcades experience (famously delineated by Berlin-born Walter Benjamin) as a step-up from the pile-em-high duty-free of the early jet age. Airports are necessary evils whose atmosphere blends befuddled anxiety and soul-sapping ennui. The logistics of air travel - i.e. the need for check-in, security clearance and the likelihood of long delays - means that the airport terminal is a form of purgatory far worse than a seaport or railway station, as Edward Snowden could probably attest.

The airport city is less about the physical centrality of the airport and more about the city's dependence on international flows of goods and people. An aerotroplis is not the result of the insertion of an airport into an existing city, otherwise London's gravitational centre might have shifted to Silvertown some years ago, but the creation of a brand-new urbs around a runway or four. As such, the idea is a combination of clean-slate futurism (with echoes of Futurism) and the yearning for a homogeneous, global environment suitable for the executive class, hence the emblematic importance of seafood bars and luxury brand outlets. There is a palpable nostalgia both for the bourgeois cosmopolitanism of La Belle Époque (the Art Nouveau styling of Café Rouge) and the hopeful glamour of the 1920s (the Art Deco styling of Caviar House & Prunier). The use of aeroplane iconography in the commercial areas of airport terminals is rare, though this may be partly to avoid travellers dwelling on the improbability of flight. You're more likely to see representations of the Orient Express or the SS Normandie than an Airbus A380.

These purpose-built hubs are best seen not as isolated initiatives but as a single "global network whose fast-moving packets are people and goods instead of data". The usually unstated assumption is that some travellers matter more than others: "Floating above it all, meanwhile, are the globe-trotting executives chasing emerging markets". This explains both the comforting evocation of earlier golden ages of travel (i.e. the reassurance of class boundaries and status) and the homogenised corporate advertising that attempts to simultaneously assure us that the world is both hugely various and fundamentally the same everywhere.

One thing I've always found slightly off-putting about airline advertising - specifically advertising by non-budget airlines and national carriers - is the hint of heaven: the stewardesses as angels or houris, the soft focus and sense of antiseptic calm, the (worrying) suggestion that a place in the clouds is your actual destination. It always makes me think of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death.

We ignore the obvious dissonance between this heavenly atmosphere and the noisy, cramped, fart-laden reality of coach class because we appreciate being transferred quickly from A to B (and because after 5 hours stuck in a "lounge" we'd happily stand knee-deep in pig-shit to get on the move); but surely nobody has ever voluntarily switched their bank account to HSBC because of one of their annoyingly self-satisfied posters? I wonder if the same-but-different schizophrenia of corporate advertising is solely intended to soothe the nagging anxiety of the ungrounded executive.

Apart from force of circumstances, I was musing on airports due to the recent reports that a second runway for Gatwick is looking more likely, which would put it on a par with Heathrow, and because Berlin has been heavily defined by its airports, real and imagined, over the last 100 years. We flew in to Schönefeld, which was the main airport of East Germany and is now the focus for budget airlines. It is due to be subsumed into the new two-runway Berlin-Brandenburg airport, currently being constructed alongside it. Once complete, this will lead to the closure of Tegel airport, which was originally built in 1948 for the Berlin Airlift. That had proved necessary because Tempelhof, the main airport during the Weimar and Nazi years, was too short for the larger transport planes required during the airlift and the commercial jets that came after (though it was fine for the rocket ships in Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle).

An earlier Berlin airport at Staaken was used in the manufacture of zeppelins, and was re-purposed after WW1 as a film studio where part of Fritz Lang's Metropolis was shot. That film famously envisaged planes flying between skyscrapers in the city of the future, without the aid of traffic lights (and no obvious landing strips).

As a city, Berlin today has few really tall skyscrapers, despite the ongoing post-1989 building boom, with the 1969 Fernsehturm TV tower at Alexanderplatz still dominating the skyline. This shows that Lang's vision of the future was no more accurate than Hitler and Speer's bonkers Germania. Despite the weight of the past, Berlin does not feel like a city of ghosts. As you watch the kids playing hide-and-seek in the Holocaust Memorial, or wander through the typical living room in the DDR Museum (which looks little different to a British living room of the 1970s), you notice how lightly history is worn. Some of this effect is the result of the destruction of the city's fabric in WW2, and some the conscious efforts of both East and West to build a positive image during the Cold War years in what was, in West Berlin at least, an aerotropolis avant la lettre.

What I take away from this trip, apart from a gut-full of pork products, is a renewed respect for London's fragmented airport system. It obviously has its problems, but the solutions are incremental: an extra runway, better rail links, onsite cinemas etc. Folies de grandeur like Boris Island may appeal to the Hitler in us all, but the result is likely to disappoint. For the record, Berlin-Brandenburg airport is expected to be delivered at least 4 years late and vastly over budget.