Zeitgeist and other stories

A friend of mine recently excitedly pointed me in the direction of Zeitgeist: The Movie, a viral internet phenomenon that has conspiracy-hungry internet kids all excited and dropping spam-like links like a little spider-bot army.I missed the first part, which apparently focuses on the idea that the Christian religion is a bunch of lies (fabricated from bits and pieces from preceding religions), and that therefore our current system is also based on lies.

I ended up watching the ´meatier´ Zeitgeist addendum which deals with how the system enslaves us all and what we can do about it. Now, credit to the film-makers, though referencing them, they´ve avoided the major conspiracy pitfalls, that is, attributing things to the Jews, the lizards, the illuminati or the Bilderberg Group.Their principal target is the major banking institutions like Citibank and JP Morgan.

It´s good that they´ve avoided this, because the enslavement of humanity is pitched as being the result of banks making money out of thin air, putting us all in debt and meaning we all have to work to service debts, a staple of conspiraloon anti-semite, ufologists. Rather than put on my amateur economists hat, I´ll let other people, just as opposed to capitalism as these Zeitgeist fellas, explain why it´s nonsense:

The booklet explains that US banks are required by law to keep a “fraction” of deposits as “reserves” in its vaults and/or a balance with the Fed, and says:

“For example, if reserves of 20 percent were required, deposits could expand only until they were five times as large as reserves. Reserves of $10 million could support deposits of $50 million” (p. 4).

This is a very misleading way of putting as it could suggest that if banks receive total new deposits of $10 million they can immediately proceed to make loans of four times this. This is not so, and not really what the booklet meant to suggest. What it means is that the banks can immediately lend out only four-fifths of $10 million, or $8 million, and that this circulates throughout the banking system leading in theory to new loans totalling in the end $40 million, bringing total “bank deposits” up to $50 million.

Please note. I´m not citing a pro-capitalist source. These people have no vested interest in the status-quo, nor in preserving the rule of elites. They aren´t brainwashed by capitaism, quite the opposite in fact. It´s just that they understand economics better than the Zeitgeist people (read it, in full, it´s a really good explanation).

This is really the crux of the film´s case. From the Federal Reserve fraud conspiracy (a staple of Paulianism too), we move onto IMF loans and coup d´etats in Latin America, and how the secret cabal organised those to maintain control for the bankers (who obviously control the government through campaign contributions). There´s a mixture of the true and the misunderstood in there, which gets us smoothly into the station at SECRET-CABAL-RUNNING-THE-WORLD-UNDER-LYME.

After that we throw in the ´planned-obsolescence´conspiracy that must have been doing the rounds since the beginning of the 20th century at least (coming as the EU bans old-style lightbulbs), and contains the absolutely true idea that we could do more about climate change and scarcity if humanity as a collective actually wanted to, rather than just focusing our efforts on getting by / enriching the minority.

This all ends by advocating utopian technocracy The Venus Project or as they call it a Resource Economy. Then some ideas for joining groups, spreading the word, making converts and boycotting stuff.

Fine. It´s one of the least offensive conspiracy theories I´ve heard. They´ve avoided anti-semitism or any of the more ludicrous ideas people have come up with over the years to explain who runs the world.

We are though, still stuck on several points. Firstly, not to the dredge the old man up but, ´philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it´, it´s all very well identifying the evil cabal running the world, but if you´ve no analysis of how social relationships work in a society, then you´re no closer to breaking them. Your research isn´t putting a weapon in people´s hands.

Secondly, even if the monetarist conspiracy was true (which it´s not), it doesn´t explain the historical presence of hierarchy and domination in human society that predates the existence of the banking firms. Feudal domination was a social relationship, just as early capitalism was, and, in reality, modern capitalism is. It´s not a trick devised by a small cabal, but how our lives interact with each other, the contested relationships of power between us. Imagine we shut down the federal reserve (and I presume, though the film doesn´t make it explicit, the equivalent institutions around the world). What would change? If the principle of private property persisted, we would still be divided into classes. The people who own the things we need to produce, and the ways in which you distribute them, would still be in charge. So, I would still wake up, needing to earn money to survive, which I could only obtain by working for a capitalist.

The trouble with conspiracy theories is that they´re all rendered pointless by one fundamental, unarguable element of capitalism. That it is, whatever else you have to say about, positive or negative, a system of elites. It has elitism coded into it´s DNA, from the smallest company, to the largest multinational, from the political system to the culture. It´s purpose is to promote elites. It does this legitimately within the logic of the system. It does this publicly, lording super-capitalists like Bill Gates or even for a time, Enron boss Ken Lay. It lays its theories of elitism out for all to see, in policy projects, in university research, through political theorists.

It has no interest in secret cabals, or conspiracies. It has no need for them. It is a system openly, and publicly, run by elites. They might go home at night and secretly dine with their illuminati, lizard-jew, Bilderberg Group friends, and laugh about how they´ve taken over the world. It doesn´t matter to me or you whether they do or not. They are the elite, and we can see who they are and how they live their lives. People know that we live in a system of elites, that acts in its own interests, according to the logic of the society they dominate. Everyone who looks around know this. We don´t need internet documentaries to tell us that we´re dominated, we just need to go to work, or walk through a posh neighbourhood or have a run-in with any politicians, big businessman or even a celebrity to know that. What we need are weapons, ways of challenging that domination, so maybe we don´t have to live under it forever.

Originally published at MATBlog

Jamón Ibérico

You´ll have to excuse the lack of activity of late, between posting on the wonderful new MATBlog and moving into a new house, I´ve been a bit busy. So here´s a post that appears there too:

Madrid is the roadworks capital of the world. The just keep digging the place up everywhere you go, without distinction between rich neighbourhoods or poor. They just absolutely love opening holes in the ground, producing endless old jokes about digging for treasure. After a six week working trip back home, I got back here to discover they´d changed roads after actually finishing something for once - Jacometrezo Street. After dodging construction teams every day on the way to work for 9 months, there was something weird about the street.

Not that it was finished. Not that I could sit outside at the cafe without an accompaniment of drills and wolf-whistling mustachioed Ecuadorians. But that the street was exactly the same. Same arrangement, same traffic lights, same underground parking. Everything exactly the same. I stood about trying to work out what they´d actually spent 12 months doing. Then it clicked. What they´d done was change it from a flat, pot-hole free, perfectly adequate tarmac road to a brick road. According to the sign the Ministry for Economic Stimulus put up, they´d spent 2 million euros, countless interruptions to residents and business to change the aesthetic of the place.

The more you walk around, the more you can see that the PSOE´s 11bn stimulus has just been thrown in the appropriate directions to keep people working. No attempt to do anything of any actual use with it. Just keeping the construction industry from entirely collapsing. There´s clearly some serious pork going on, something that occasionally gets the PSOE in trouble, like with the general strike it provoked in Lebrija this February. Basically people pissed off in a tiny town near Sevilla were protesting that the state money being distributed through the trade unions was only going to members of the CC.OO and the UGT (the PCE and PSOE´s pet unions respectively).

The weird thing though is that aside from this incident Spain despite suffering a bigger rise in unemployment than all of the other countries in Europe put together, now topping the Eurozone league with 18.1% (a combination of historical high levels in the South, and the complete collapse of the two major industries, auto manufacture and construction), has experienced virtually no significant unrest. A handful of small strikes, some very specific problems in the North (related to the PNV losing the last round of elections there - largely due to extensive gerrymandering), and that aside the government has basically got a pass on the state of the place.

I read an interesting article a little while ago that shed some light on why this was. Spanish people have much bigger social networks that are insulating them from the recession. When people lose their jobs they´ve got a wider safety net based on large interconnected families. Young people especially tend to live with their parents until they´re much older.

But the flipside of this is that it becomes self-defeating circle. Employers continuously abuse the internship/apprenticeship system by hiring people just to fill regular positions, paying salaries that are impossible to live off in urban areas (often 600-700 euros a month), which people accept, because they can, which in turn means they never have any motivation to leave home and demand good housing and decent paying jobs.

Additionally, Spain, a European frontier state these days, has managed to avoid problems related to its large immigrant population (the largest group in Madrid is Ecuadoreans and nationally Moroccans), large numbers of whom came over to work in the burgeoning construction industry. The report put this down to several things. Firstly, the tendency of migrants to pack up and go home when the work dries up (one of the rarely mentioned aspects of the economic migration phenomena is that it´s self-regulating, peak migration tends to coincide with high employment), and secondly Spain´s massive black market.

Far more so than the UK, which has a fringe black market economy, small enough to be mostly contained in small enclaves. Spain has a thriving, publicly unavoidable parallel economic system, which keeps millions of people without recourse to conventional economic means afloat during the recession. Walk through almost any major Spanish city and it´s obvious; movable bazaars dot the street, brothels dot otherwise respectable streets, people wander into bars with lighters, tissues (bizarrely) or a wide variety of flashing tat to sell.

Weirdly enough all of this was supposed to disappear with European integration and modernisation. But the Spanish miracle was based on housing prices, selling land all along that massive and beautiful coast of theirs, the Marbella-zation of the whole country. The export of land got to such a point that whole communities were dominated by ex-pats to the extent that they were electing ex-pat mayors and the DWP now has a big branch in Madrid.

With that market completely collapsing (see the ITV documentary on the subject recently), Spain has fallen back on old habits; patronage, kinships networks and black markets; to keep people´s head above water.