"Après moi, le déluge!" in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

A detail of the Last Judgement by the Venetian artist Tintoretto.

Tintoretto's judgement day at the end of days is a version of the flood, le déluge!

A rainbow was the sign of God's covenant to never destroy all life on earth with a global flood again.

Rainbows as a sign of a promise

So, as a symbol of hope, many rainbow images have been created.

The colours of everyday objects, transformed by assembly into rainbow designs, shows how a "wealth of things" can be creatively used to produce a psychological benefit in the midst of this crisis.

Create a rainbow with things in your 'bubble' (at home)

So, the Museum of New Zealand, in Wellington suggests. The Museum is currently closed, but a visit to the Museum website celebrates another "rainbow", with: 

LGBTQI+histories of Aotearoa New Zealand

And equal value is given to the language and identity of the Indigenous Peoples of New Zealand, so:

Waihangatia tētahi kōpere ki ngā mea kei tō ‘mirumiru’ (ki te kāinga)

Rainbows can be found everywhere – even in a times of isolation rainbows can brighten our lives and bring joy. Inspired by the colourful artworks in the collection can you create your own rainbow using items you can find in your bubble?

Remember to show us! #TePapaWhānauChallenge

All we can say is . . . . WOW!!

. . . and that also goes for Re:LODE Radio too!!

The National Museum uses the name Aotearoa, together with the name New Zealand, to refer to the country by also using the Māori name for the country. Aotearoa was originally used by the Māori people in reference to only the North Island but, since the late 19th century, the word has come to refer to the country as a whole.

Several meanings have been proposed for the name; the most popular meaning usually given is "land of the long white cloud", that refers to the cloud formations which helped early Polynesian navigators find these geographically isolated lands.

Beginning in the late 20th century, Aotearoa, as a name for the nation, is becoming increasingly widespread in the use of bilingual names of national organisations and institutions, as in the National Museum.

The Māori are the Indigenous People of New Zealand. In the Māori language, the word māori means "normal", "natural" or "ordinary". In legends and oral traditions, the word distinguished ordinary mortal human beings, tāngata māori, from deities and spirits, wairua. Likewise, wai māori denotes "fresh water", as opposed to salt water. These are cognate words, that is words that have a common etymological origin in most Polynesian languages, all deriving from Proto-Polynesian ma(a)qoli, which has the reconstructed meaning "true, real, genuine". 

The Māori Indigenous People originated with the first settlers coming from eastern Polynesia, arriving on these islands shores in several waves of waka, or canoe voyages that probably took place between around 1320 and 1350.

Over several centuries of relative cultural isolation, these settlers developed their own distinctive culture, whose language, mythology, crafts and performing arts evolved independently from those of other eastern Polynesian cultures.

The first European explorer to visit the islands, was the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who named the islands Staten Land, believing they were part of the Staten Landt that Jacob Le Maire had sighted off the southern end of South America. After Hendrik Brouwer proved that this South American land was a small island in 1643, Dutch cartographers subsequently renamed Tasman's discovery Nova Zeelandia, from Latin, after the Dutch province of Zeeland. Subsequently the Dutch name of Nieuw Zeeland was anglicised to New Zealand.

The British explorer, navigator and cartographer, James Cook, recorded Māori names for the two islands, as he had heard them pronounced – ‘Eaheinomauwe' for the presently named North Island and ‘Toai Poonamoo’ for the presently named South Island. The original names were perhaps the spoken phrases: He-mea-hī-nō-Māui (the things Māui fished up), and Te Wai Pounamu (greenstone waters). The third island is the much smaller Stewart Island/Rakiura, commonly known as Stewart Island, and is New Zealand's third-largest island, located 30 kilometres south of the South Island, across the Foveaux Strait.

The individual names for these islands given by the Europeans was entirely determined by a colonialist, geographic mindset of spatial organisation, and appropriation. So, ‘North’, ‘Middle’ and ‘South’ as names for the three islands had appeared on a map by 1820. 

They were nearly a second Ireland, Englands first colonial territories. In 1840 Governor William Hobson named them New Ulster, New Munster and New Leinster after three Irish regions, but these names were abandoned after the provinces, which had taken the names of the first two, were abolished in 1852. The South Island was recorded as an alternative to Middle Island in the 1830s, and has been the official name since 1907.

The LODE Zone Line crosses both the island of Ireland and the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand, so the matrix of LODE connections is further reinforced by this colonial history and colonial geography.

The communication of Eurasian infectious disease to the Māori

The modern, colonial history of the Māori people, includes the catastrophic impact of epidemic diseases that were introduced through the arrival of European settlers. The Māori suffered high mortality rates from Eurasian infectious diseases, such as influenza, smallpox and measles, which killed an estimated 10 to 50 per cent of the Māori population at various times during the nineteenth century.

There are some accounts of this catastrophe as it took place in an area of the South Island called Otago, and that has some interest to Re:LODE Radio as it is traversed by the LODE Zone Line.

Otago spans the widest part of the South Island.

In the west, it includes the glaciated mountains of eastern Mount Aspiring National Park. To the south and east, lakes Wakatipu, Wānaka and Hāwea fill deep basins dug by ice-age glaciers. Queenstown, on the shore of 80-kilometre-long Lake Wakatipu, is known for its mountain views, especially the jagged outline of The Remarkables.

The landscapes of Central Otago are austere. Broad, rounded summits are covered in tussock and separated by wide basins. Sheltered by mountains on all sides, Central Otago is New Zealand’s driest area, and is a major fruit and wine-growing region. The rivers were there before the ranges were uplifted, and have maintained their courses, carving deep rocky gorges through the rising mountains.

Towards the coast, rainfall increases and the landscape becomes much greener. The city of Dunedin lies on the fringes of an ancient volcano, extinct for about 10 million years. The volcano has been deeply eroded by streams, and as the sea rose at the end of the last ice age, it flooded a valley and formed Otago Harbour. The city lies at the head of the harbour. 

Calculations regarding the number of Indigenous People inhabiting this region prior to, and following contact with European settlers are a matter of speculation, but there are some eyewitness accounts around the time that the epidemics of infectious Eurasian disease impacted the Māori communities in the 1830's.

Māori depopulation in the South was chiefly an unintended consequence of contact completed by early assimilation in intermarriage, writes Peter Entwisle for the Otago Daily Times (20 Oct 2006):

We should recognise the decline was catastrophic for many and culturally a matter for regret.

A recent Otago Daily Times editorial maintained that in the 1820s the Maori population of southern New Zealand ‘numbered only about 800’. It also said that Mohi Maraetaia, who died in Stewart Island in 1910, was the last ‘full-blooded’ Maori in the south. (ODT 4/10/06) 

My 1998 book Behold the Moon contained an appendix looking at changing views of southern Maori population numbers which showed not only considerable diversity but a growing, new consensus. Since 1998 I have found further information and have revised that assessment.

When I speak of ‘southern New Zealand’ I mean what we refer to as ‘Otago and ‘Southland’, the territory of the old Otago Province, basically all of New Zealand south of the Waitaki mouth on the east coast and Awarua Point on the west.

It has long been recognised that the south east coast was one of the earliest areas of Polynesian occupation in New Zealand. There is a camp site at Kaikai’s Beach, just north of Otago Heads, dated to about 1100 AD. In the earliest, moa hunter or Archaic period, this was an area of relatively greater population while most of the North Island was scarcely inhabited. It is thought that phase saw a population peak between about 1350-1450. With the decline of moa and the introduction of the kumara in the north, population in this area declined. From the late 1500s it seems to have grown again. It is times after these we are concerned with.

In my 1998 assessment I pointed to a study by Elizabeth Durward, published in 1933, which impressively reviewed the then available evidence. She concluded that before 1769, although there were some people living in the province’s interior, then, as later, most people were concentrated around Foveaux Strait and Otago Harbour. Those places had permanent settlements, though smaller than the larger villages of the Auckland Province. She thought the whole provincial population was very small but increased after the introduction of the European potato to about 2,000 in 1835, just before a devastating measles epidemic. She thought the population in and near the Otago Harbour was the greatest in the south with permanent settlements at modern Otakou, and Whareakeake (Murdering Beach), the latter reaching a maximum of 500 people. She recorded a tradition of an earlier epidemic some time between 1800 and 1820 implying larger figures than hers.

In 1949 the well-regarded A.H. McLintock in The History of Otago, claimed southern Maori lived nomadically, not in year-round settlements, and that before 1769 the whole provincial population was about ‘three or four hundred natives’. He thought in the early decades of the 19th century it had increased considerably. This is probably the calculation lying behind the figure of ‘about 800’ in the 1820s.

In the 1970s John Boultbee’s journal came to light, recording his impressions from living among southern Maori in the 1820s. This confirmed Durward’s account of population distribution and the pre-eminent size of the Otago Harbour settlements, also the longevity of these and other settlements.

Atholl Anderson, a distinguished Archaeologist, writing in 1983, came to figures similar to Durward’s. In 1993 Harry Evison, an authority on Maori historical sources, used reports of fighting strengths to point cautiously towards higher figures. Other writers also leaned that way. In 1996 a study of the Shag River Mouth settlement put beyond doubt the year-round occupation of Moa Hunter sites. In 1998 Anderson upwardly revised his figures for a peak population in the 1820s. He was sceptical about epidemics but accepted there’d been devastating ones in the 1830s. Overall there were plausible provincial totals for the late 1820s ranging from 2,000 to 4,000.

Since then I have become aware of eyewitness accounts and contemporary newspaper reports of a measles epidemic in 1835 followed by a flu epidemic in 1836. One of these, the Sydney Herald 21/11/1836, said the measles had ‘carried off at least 600 of the natives’ and many of the survivors were then afflicted by influenza. This appears to be speaking specifically of Otago (modern Otakou). Even if it were the whole of the south, and allowing for newspaper exaggeration, it represents a phenomenal mortality.

There is also a letter, written in 1890, reporting the recollection of an informant, Rawiri Te Maire, who, conservatively, was born about 1820. This puts the population of Whareakeake about 1820 as 1,000 and the area of modern Otakou at 2,000. The recorder questioned this but it corresponds with European recollections of population numbers in the mid 1830s recorded about the same time.

I have also come across the opinion of Elie le Guillou, Surgeon-Major on D’Urville’s expedition which visited Otago Harbour in 1840. He put the figure there then as about 200 but ten years earlier as 1,200. He was aware of the 1830s epidemics. As a medical practitioner with no obvious axe to grind his figures perhaps have a greater claim to credibility than other Europeans’ similar, or larger, estimates.

No-one can claim great precision here but some things seem fairly clear. In Archaic times, and also in the Contact Period, there were settlements occupied year round. Before 1769, but also in the Contact Period, population was concentrated around Foveaux Strait and the Otago Harbour. A provincial population of only 800 in the 1820s is too low. It is unlikely to have been less than 3,000 and may have been more. It was terribly reduced at least by measles and influenza epidemics in 1835 and 1836.

The claim about Mohi Maraetaia (also known as ‘Old Moses’ and as ‘Mohi-te-Morokiekie’) is based on Herries Beattie’s 1954 report which was actually that he was ‘the last full-blooded male Maori’ in Stewart Island. He was also perhaps the last male of wholly Kati Mamoe descent.

These claims have surfaced in the contemporary discussion about the numbers of people in New Zealand today of wholly Maori descent and in the context of modern Pakeha irritability about being blamed for past misfortunes of Maori.

Maori depopulation here was chiefly an unintended consequence of contact completed by early assimilation and intermarriage.

We should recognise the decline was catastrophic for many and culturally a matter for regret. Also, that it was not specifically the fault of any group or individual. The disappearance of a specific descent group will be mourned by some. One can regret the extinction of certain families. But some old southern genes still survive and our knowledge of the past is growing. Its best use is to enhance understanding.

Getting back to being "normal" people . . .

In New Zealand it has become possible, during this past week, to look ahead to a time when it will be possible for people to step out of the "bubble" and begin thinking about taking tentative steps to an exit from "lockdown".

And this moment has arrived!

Al Jazeera covers the story . . .

What life in one neighbourhood says about New Zealand's bold, and seemingly successful, plan to eliminate COVID-19.

By Ethan Donnell, 13 May 2020. Ethan Donnell's story focuses on the experience of some of the residents of Thorndon, in the city of Wellington. The article provides an insight into how people have worked through this crisis. The article excerpts below set out the timeline from the lockdown to today, when stepping out of the "bubble" is imminent with a phased move to alert level two.  

'Be strong and be kind' 

On March 23, New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern - whom some have called "the most effective leader on the planet" - signalled that within days normal life would temporarily end.

Just two days before, she announced a four-stage coronavirus crisis response alert system, as part of an audacious strategy to eliminate rather than contain the virus. Her government had already banned travellers from China in early February, before New Zealand had even registered a single case of the virus. On March 19, she announced the closure of the nation's borders to foreigners, a move once considered unthinkable for a country at the bottom of the South Pacific that relies heavily on tourism.

In little more than 48 hours, New Zealand would move to alert level four, a nationwide lockdown lasting at least four weeks. Ardern labelled the aggressive approach "going hard and going early" - a kind of Kiwi-ism for a short, sharp lockdown. The entire country was told to stay home, unless they worked in an essential job like healthcare, and when they did go outside, to "stay local" - only exercising near home, or visiting a nearby supermarket.

Some might have been tempted to complain that such restrictions were draconian. But Ardern relayed the order with clarity and empathy. On that day she also introduced "the bubble", a concept to help New Zealanders visualise who they might have close contact with during lockdown - typically just their own household. The concept made social distancing into something tangible, like a two-metre shell protecting anyone who ventured outside.

"Be strong, and be kind," the prime minister said that day, a five-word slogan that would come to symbolise the country's unity during the lockdown, as messages like "be kind" or "kia kaha" (te reo Māori for "be strong") were etched in chalk on pavements by children, while teddy bears were left in windows as part of a nationwide game of I-spy.

But, on March 23, not even Prime Minister Ardern knew what would happen next. "The situation here is moving at pace," she explained, referring to the country's number of coronavirus cases, then 102. "And so must we."

In response, the island nation of almost five million people moved swiftly, and en masse - to the supermarket.

Jack Gilchrist is a checkout operator at Thorndon New World, 10 minutes by foot from The Beehive, New Zealand's Parliament building, from where the announcement was made.

Thorndon is the oldest neighbourhood in New Zealand, founded by European settlers in 1840. The suburb today forms a rough triangle at the end of a narrow coastal plain in the heart of Wellington, the capital city. Slightly more than 4,000 people live there; the stereotype goes that most residents are either government workers or retirees.

Jack says within an hour of the lockdown announcement checkout queues extended down the aisles, reaching the other side of the store. Overwhelmed by demand, the store would be forced to close its underground car park to new customers that afternoon.

Only days later, the store was transformed. Operating now under a "one in, one out" policy, the queue of shoppers at the entrance extends into the car park, each shopper spaced two metres apart, the spacing indicated by tape on the ground. A man ushering shopping trolleys herds queueing shoppers, using wide, gestural motions like an air traffic controller.

The first days of the lockdown were marked with uncertainty, as the number of cases skyrocketed. At a daily news conference, Ardern issued her statements as if they were reassuring notes. "Shop normally," she urged. "The supply chain is strong; we won't run out of food."

On April 27, New Zealand eased its stringent lockdown measures, moving to alert level three. At the time, 1,400 people had become infected with the coronavirus, while 12 people had died, all older people with pre-existing health conditions. New Zealand's mortality rate was one of the lowest in the world, according to the Oxford University coronavirus government response tracker.

"We have done what very few countries have been able to do," Ardern said upon making the announcement that New Zealand would move to alert level three. "We have stopped a wave of devastation."

Perhaps the biggest change was restaurants would be allowed to reopen, for delivery and contactless pickup. The announcement caused "McDonalds" to trend briefly on Twitter in New Zealand. The announcement was also good news for Shu and Alex. They reopened Starfish on April 27, though only for contactless pickup. Over the first week at alert level three, New Zealanders bought five weeks' worth of takeout.

Breaking out of the bubble

"We will be breaking out of our bubbles," Jacinda Ardern said this week, announcing a phased move to alert level two and out of lockdown, in little more than 48 hours. Much of the economy would reopen on May 14, she said, including restaurants, malls, cinemas, shops, health services and hairdressers. Next Monday, May 18, schools would reopen. Then on May 21, bars would be allowed to reopen.

As the lockdown lifts, 1,497 New Zealanders have become infected with coronavirus, while 21 people have died. There have been no new cases for the last two days; 94 percent of cases have already recovered.

But now, the country turns its attention to the economic consequences of a harsh lockdown. Estimates are that New Zealand's unemployment could reach as high as 13.5 percent in the coming months. The lower end projections are 10 percent, around 275,000 people without jobs.

"New Zealand is about to enter a very tough winter," Ardern said. "But every winter is followed by spring, and if we make the right choices we can get New Zealanders back to work and our economy moving again quickly."

"Après moi, le déluge!"

This quotation, that introduces the themes of today's post, is a version of a French expression, "Après nous, le déluge"; meaning "After us, the flood", attributed to Madame de Pompadour, the politically influential mistress of King Louis XV of France.

An alternative form, attributed to Louis himself, is "Après moi, le déluge", "After me, the flood". There are two possible interpretations: Firstly,"After my reign, the nation will be plunged into chaos and destruction”; or "After me, let the deluge come", meaning that he does not care what happens after his death. The second corresponds to the meaning of "Après nous, le déluge" according to Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: "Ruin, if you like, when we are dead and gone."

Who cares?

In contrast to Jacinda Ardern's political and practical leadership in New Zealand, we are also currently witnessing the incompetence of Donald Trump who, like King Louis XV of France, doesn't seem to care about what happens, either during, or following his presidency.

Noam Chomsky: Trump is culpable in deaths of Americans

Further to this interview, Richard Partington of the Guardian brings some useful context to Noam Chomsky's accusation (Mon 11 May 2020) concerning the consequences of Trump's policies on health provision in the United States, and the stoking up of international confrontations in the attempt to find convenient "scapegoats" to deflect attention from his culpability in the deaths of Americans.

Chomsky was speaking in an interview to mark the launch of the Progressive International, a global initiative to unite, organise and mobilise progressive forces around the world.

Progressive International

First convened by Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, and Yanis Varoufakis, the former Greek finance minister, it aims to mount a fightback against the increasing rise of rightwing populist movements around the globe.

Other members include Katrín Jakobsdóttir, the Icelandic prime minister, former Labour shadow chancellor John McDonnell, the authors Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy, and Rafael Correa, the former president of Ecuador. In September, pandemic permitting, the council will convene for an inaugural summit in Reykjavik.

Also speaking in an interview to mark the launch, Varoufakis said articles he and Sanders wrote in the Guardian two years ago were among catalysts for launching the Progressive International.

He said: “It’s been urgent for quite a while now. If anything I’m worried that we’re coming to the party too late. I hope not..”

Expressing anger at the EU response to the pandemic as a “very sad dereliction of duty”, he said the crisis could tear apart the euro single currency bloc. “I don’t think the eurozone can survive it. But it can survive long enough to deplete huge amounts of wealth and social capital. Europe is rich enough, it can pretend and extend.”

EU leaders have agreed to draw up a €540bn (£480bn) package of emergency measures. However, there is a deep split between countries demanding grants for stricken economies, such as Italy and Spain, and northern members such as Germany who favour loans.
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The launch of Progressive International comes amid growing calls to drastically alter the global economic and political status quo as Covid-19 continues to expose and exacerbate entrenched levels of inequality and poverty.

Pressure had also been mounting since the 2008 financial crisis to reverse more than four decades of government retreat from intervening in the economy, amid widespread dissatisfaction with modern capitalism from supporters and detractors.

Faced with rightwing nationalist responses and the growing urgency to combat global heating, McDonnell said the new organisation would help develop and promote a more progressive vision of the future.

Speaking to the Guardian, he said: “This initiative comes at just the right time. It’s about the nature of society we want. It’s also about how we tackle the real threat upon us from climate change.”

Comparing the threats from rightwing populism to the rise of Nazism in 1928 when he was born, Chomsky said two approaches were being promoted in the response to Covid-19.

He said: “One is let’s take the savage, Reagan, Thatcher approach and make it worse. That’s one way. The other way is to try to dismantle the structures, the institutional structures that have been created; that have led to very ugly consequences for much of the population of much of the world, [and] are the source of this pandemic. To dismantle them and move on to a better world.”

“It’s not easy. There are forces fighting back. The International is going to be facing similar attacks. To overcome them, it depends on the peasants with the pitchforks.”

Future of the international left . . .

Bernie Sanders

Yanis Varoufakis

Karl Marx wrote in Das Kapital (Vol. 1, Part III, Chapter Ten, Section 5) "Après moi, le déluge! is the watchword of every capitalist and of every capitalist nation. Hence Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the labourer, unless under compulsion from society."

Nesrine Malik's opinion piece was headlined in the guardian print edition (Mon 11 May 2020):

How Covid-19 blindsided the Anglo-American capitalist model . . .

Nesrine Malik writes under the subheading:

Even before the pandemic hit, both nations had been stripped of the people and systems required to respond effectively

And a sense of the pervading irony is not lost in her damning indictment of the "business as usual" position embedded in the UK/USA status quo. She writes:

There’s something profound about the irony. The world’s highest coronavirus death tolls belong to two countries whose leaders came to power promising the restoration of greatness and control – the United States and Great Britain. Neither can claim to have been caught by surprise: both nations had the benefit of time, ample scientific warnings, and the cautionary examples of China and Italy.

The similarities are striking, the conclusions unavoidable. Here in the UK, we comforted ourselves with the belief that while our own buffoonish rightwing leader had his faults, at least he was no Donald Trump. But in the end, Boris Johnson has managed to stumble over even this lowest of hurdles. The UK government’s response to the crisis has turned out to be nearly as flippant and ill-prepared as the US’s.

Two nations that prided themselves on their extraordinary economic, historical and political status have been brought to their knees. Their fall from grace is the outcome of a damaged political culture and distinct form of Anglo-American capitalism.

Over the past four years, reckless political decisions were justified by subordinating reality to rhetoric. The cost of leaving the EU would be “virtually nil”, with a free trade agreement that would be one of the “easiest in human history”. Imaginary enemies were erected and fake fights confected as both countries pugnaciously went about severing their ties with other nations and international institutions.

Political discourse focused on grand abstract notions of rebirth and restoration, in a way that required few concrete deliverables. All the Tory government needed to do was Get Brexit Done, no matter how slapdash the job. In the US, all Trump needed to do to maintain his supporters’ loyalty was bark about a wall with Mexico every now and then, pass a racist travel ban, and savage various public figures for sport.

This is corrosive stuff – not only to the quality of public debate, but to the calibre of politicians. When the business of government becomes limited to populist set pieces, its ranks are purged of doers and populated instead with cheerleaders. This is how we ended up with the current cast of dazed-in-headlights Tory cabinet members. In the US, the very notion of an “administration” has been worn away. As the New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen puts it, “There is no White House. Not in the sense that journalists have always used that term. It’s just Trump – and people who work in the building.”

By the time Covid-19 hit their shores, the UK and US were lacking not just the politicians but the bureaucracies required to respond effectively. Prior to the crisis, Trump repeatedly attempted to defund the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In the UK, the pandemic inconvenienced a Tory cabinet embroiled in a feud with its own civil service. The intellectual and practical infrastructure to deal with facts had been vandalised.

But there is a longer, non-partisan history that rendered both nations incapable of an adequate response to the pandemic. The special relationship is not just one of linguistic and cultural proximity, but an ideological partnership forged in the post-second world war era. Anglo-American capitalism, pursued by both right and centre-left parties, rooted in small government and powered by exceptionalism, had dismantled the state. No notice or warning could have refashioned the machinery of government quickly enough to save lives. An economic and political model that hinges on privatisation, liberalisation and the withdrawal of labour rights created a system prone to regular crises, despite such shocks being framed as one-offs.

The economic and regulatory kinship was strengthened by the transformation of Britain’s quaint and mercantile financial sector into a replica of the US’s aggressive markets. The City caught up with Wall Street.

An interventionist foreign policy – publicly moralistic but privately cynical – gave the model an expansionist edge, which helped both nations project power abroad and defend their own financial and political interests. But the wars led to quagmires, and the rapidly expanding financial sectors to economic near-death experiences. Neither triggered significant rethinking or reflection. After the 2008 financial crisis, when this system came within “48 hours” of the “apocalypse”, two centre-left leaders, Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, chose to shore up the infrastructure that had brought their economies to the brink, recapitalising the banks and revitalising the markets, opting for more regulation rather than fundamental reform.

Just as the financial crash was treated as the malfunctioning of a particular unsupervised bug in the system rather than as a feature of it, so is the failure to grapple with the pandemic being cast as an unforeseen, exogenous event, rather than a result of an ideology that enables the state to scramble unprecedented resources to save banks but not lives. A nurse will wear a bin liner as PPE in the US for longer than a failing bank can go unfinanced.

Hollow triumphalism about making America great again and Britain taking back control becomes more and more likely in such a system. Trump and the Tories alighted on this formula not entirely out of mendacity or ideology. Without radically challenging Anglo-American capitalism, they have nothing else to offer their voters. And so they must separate economic suffering from politics, and attempt to blame it on immigrants and outsiders. They must blame other countries and international institutions – the EU, WHO, Nato – for the feelings of helplessness experienced by their own citizens. The swagger is a facade. Behind it hides a rotting national landscape.

As the bodies pile up, the failure of the US and the UK will be somehow spun into victory. The triumphalism will intensify; that is certain. The only question now is how many will continue to believe it.

View from the North . . .

The "rainbow" assemblages in New Zealand, made from objects of everyday life in the "bubble", remind Re:LODE Radio of this artwork by Tony Cragg in the Tate Gallery collection.

Britain Seen from the North 1981 by Tony Cragg. This installation photograph is taking a view of the work from "the south"?

Tony Cragg made this work during a visit to Britain in 1981, when he felt that the nation was beset by social and economic difficulties. The figure to the left is a portrait of the artist "looking" at Britain from the north. Cragg lives in Germany, so although Britain is his native country he was viewing it through the eyes of an outsider.

A new normality?

Kate Connolly in Berlin reported for the Guardian (Thu 7 May 2020) under the subheading:

Robert Koch Institute says approach now is to ‘learn to live with the virus and control it’

Kate Connolly writes:

Germany will have to learn to live with the coronavirus, building tactics such as physical distancing and strict hygiene into normal daily life, the country’s leading public health institution has said as it wound up its regular press briefings on the pandemic as a result of a continued fall in new infections.

Lars Schaade, the vice-president of the Robert Koch Institute, said that as Germany’s infection rate had been “substantially pushed back”, the decision to drop its briefing – which has attracted millions of viewers since it began in February, firstly daily and later twice weekly – marked a “new phase”.

“The epidemic is of course not over,” he said. “But having substantially pushed the virus back so that the number of new cases are between 600 and 1,300 a day … our approach now has to be to learn to live with the virus and to control it.”

Journalists attending the briefing strongly voiced their opposition to the briefing being scrapped. It has provided the public and media with detailed information on Germany’s infection rates, up-to-date information on the virus’s development, and explanations on preventive measures and the science behind public health decisions, free of any political colouring.

Schaade said the media could continue to put questions to the institute’s press department and there would be press conferences in the event of significant developments.

Germany has had 166,091 confirmed cases of coronavirus as of Thursday, according to figures registered with the RKI, an increase of 1,284 since Wednesday. There were concerns that the numbers of new cases were increasing, but Schaade insisted they reflected the normal development on a weekly basis, with higher numbers often registered on Wednesdays and Thursdays.

The country’s reproduction or R rate has fallen to 0.65, meaning that on average every 10 infected people are infecting between six and seven others.

Schaade said he expected the pandemic to last for many more months, and most likely into next year. “It’s clear this virus cannot be eradicated in Germany. There’s consensus on that – at least until there’s a vaccine or a treatment. We will have to try to build this virus into our everyday lives, changing our behaviour to reduce its transmission. We find ourselves in a new normality.”

He said tackling the virus required each person to take responsibility for his or her own behaviour. “Only then can we control the virus and lead an appropriate life as a society.”

On Wednesday the leaders of Germany’s 16 states agreed to put the onus on regional public health authorities to monitor the virus’s progress and instigate emergency measures if infections start to rise. If the rate of new infections in a municipality exceeds 50 per 100,000 inhabitants within seven days, communities will be swiftly forced into lockdown, including the closure of schools and shops. Schaade called the measure a “pragmatic safety limit”.

There is considerable nervousness in Germany over decisions to allow all shops to open and schools to return. Angela Merkel called the decision to come out of lockdown “brave”, stressing the risk that Germany could quickly lose the advantage it has gained over the spread of the virus. “We have to be careful that this thing doesn’t slip from our grasp,” she said on Wednesday.

The chancellor has been accused by some political parties of acting too late to save the economy, while some virologists say the measures go too far too soon. The effects of the relaxation of rules are expected to be visible in infection rates around two to three weeks after their implementation.

Schaade said testing and tracing remained essential to tackling the virus. Although Germany has maintained a capacity to carry out 964,000 tests a week, only 317,000 tests were carried out last week. Schaade said this was a reflection of the fact that the number of infections had fallen, but owing to a global shortage of items such as reagents “it is not bad to have a certain remaining capacity” in expectation of a second wave.

Looking at things from the north . . .

Tony Cragg's Britain Seen from the North was assembled in 1981. The view of Britain from Germany is that the UK government acted too late when bringing in the "lockdown". Any view of Britain from the north now is not much different, even though, that was then, but this is now! The current crisis reveals the deep structural inequalities embedded in the British economy, and the catastrophic impact these inequalities have upon the health of a fractured society. These inequalities are visible on a global scale as much as on local and national scales. Although areas of severe deprivation can be found across the whole of the UK, the North of England is where social and economic inequality is most pronounced.

North - South divide . . .

Looking at deprivation on a global scale, and at socio-economic inequalities in particular, it becomes clear that this is a world divided between the North and the South.

World map showing countries above and below the world GDP (PPP) per capita in 2010, which was US$10,700. Source: IMF (International Monetary Fund).

Blue above world GDP (PPP) per capita
Orange below world GDP (PPP) per capita 

If Re:LODE Radio takes a global view on inequality then it might do so under the heading:

The world seen from the south . . .

The Brandt Line is a visual depiction of the North-South divide between their economies, based on GDP per capita, proposed by Willy Brandt in the 1980s. It encircles the world at a latitude of 30° N, passing between North and Central America, north of Africa and India, but lowered towards the south to include Australia and New Zealand above the line.

Around the same time that Tony Cragg was visiting the UK, prior to the assemblage of his piece  Britain Seen from the North, the West German politician Willy Brandt, the former German Chancellor, was engaged in 1980 by the Independent Commission as the chair of an investigation and review of international development issues. The result of what became known as the Brandt Report, provided an understanding of the drastic differences in the economic development for both the North and South hemispheres of the world. 

Back in the 1980's the terminology used to divide the "North" from the "South" was "Developed" and "Developing". Nowadays this terminology is seen to be problematic, for a host of reasons, and is instead well substituted for by the emerging term "Global South".

Entr'acte

Way down south . . .

Re:LODE Radio has its origins too . . .

. . . and a view from south London!

Looking ahead . . .

Looking ahead to life after "lockdown", and thinking about managing the aftermath of this crisis, is instigating the sharing of some radical proposals. This article appeared in the print edition of the Guardian on Thursday 7 May 2020, under the headline:

For developing nations, this crisis need not lead to disaster

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, who together won the 2019 Nobel prize in economics for their work on poverty alleviation, published this opinion piece on line (Wed 6 May 2020) under the headline and subheading:

Coronavirus is a crisis for the developing world, but here's why it needn't be a catastrophe 

A radical new form of universal basic income could revitalise damaged economies

Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee write:

While countries in east Asia and Europe are gradually taking steps towards reopening their economies, many in the global south are wondering whether the worst of the pandemic is yet to come. As economists who work on poverty alleviation in developing countries, we are often asked what the effects of coronavirus will be in south Asia and Africa. The truth is, we don’t know. Without extensive testing to map the number of cases, it’s impossible to tell how far the virus has already spread. We don’t yet have enough information about how Covid-19 behaves under different conditions such as sunlight, heat and humidity. Developing countries’ more youthful populations may spare them the worst of the pandemic, but health systems in the global south are poorly equipped to deal with an outbreak, and poverty is linked to co-morbidities that put people at a higher risk of serious illness.

Without the information widespread testing provides, many poorer countries have taken an extremely cautious approach. India imposed a total lockdown on 24 March, by which time the country had about 500 confirmed cases. Countries such as Rwanda, South Africa and Nigeria enforced lockdowns in late March, long before the virus was expected to peak. But these lockdown measures can’t last forever. Poorer countries could have used the quarantine to buy time, gather information about how the disease behaves and develop a testing and tracing strategy. Unfortunately, not much of this has happened. And, far from coming to their aid, rich countries have outrun poorer nations in the race for PPE, oxygen and ventilators.

In many places, the human toll of the lockdown is already becoming obvious. Children go without vaccinations and crops are not harvested. As construction projects stall and markets are shuttered, jobs and incomes evaporate. The effects of prolonged quarantine on developing nations could be as harmful as the virus itself. Before Covid-19 rippled across the world, 15,000 children under five died every day in the global south, mostly of preventable diseases associated with poverty. It’s likely that many more will die if their families are plunged further into poverty.

What can poor countries do in the face of this pandemic – and how can rich countries help them? First, the systematic testing strategies that have been crucial to containing the epidemic and easing lockdown measures in Europe are equally critical in poor countries. In places where public health authorities don’t have information about the spread of the virus and resources are limited, the response to coronavirus needs to be targeted at active hotspots. In this way, rather than imposing a universal lockdown, health authorities can identify the clusters where quarantine measures are required.

Second, developing countries must be able to improve the ability of their health systems to cope with a potential sudden influx of sick people.

And third, it’s crucial that poor countries are able to guarantee people a secure livelihood in the months to come. In the absence of such a guarantee, people will grow tired of quarantine measures and lockdowns will be increasingly difficult to enforce. To protect their economies from a collapse in demand, governments must reassure people that financial support will be available for as long as it’s needed.

How coronavirus is dividing India

In our recent book, written before coronavirus struck but with a title that is now eerily appropriate – Good Economics for Hard Times – we recommend that poor countries implement what we call a universal ultra basic income (UUBI), a regular cash transfer that amounts to enough for basic survival. The virtues of a UUBI are its simplicity, transparency, and its assurance that nobody will starve. It avoids the problems of many welfare systems that are designed to exclude the “non-deserving”, even at a cost to the needy. During a pandemic, when governments need to help as many people as quickly as possible, the simplicity of a UUBI could be lifesaving. Reassuring people that nobody will be excluded from subsistence aid also limits the feeling of existential foreboding that so many individuals in poor (and not so poor) countries are currently experiencing.

These ideas aren’t mere fantasy. The small west African country of Togo, with its eight million inhabitants and its GDP (purchasing power parity) per capita of $1,538, is working on all these fronts. In addition to testing 7,900 suspected cases, the country is deploying 5,000 test on a random basis to assess prevalence. Health authorities will use the results to determine when and where to restrict peoples’ mobility. The government has also launched a cash transfer scheme linking an electronic wallet to peoples’ cellphones; it already has 1.3 million people registered and has sent money to 500,000 in the region of Greater Lomé (the capital) alone.

The good news is that many countries, particularly those in Africa, already have the infrastructure to rapidly transfer money across a population using cellphones. Many people already use these systems in private exchanges, so government schemes based on this infrastructure can be up and running in a matter of days. If phone data indicates that some regions are experiencing greater economic distress, the transfer could be more generous in those places.

In fact, the greatest constraint we face isn’t the feasibility of these measures – it’s the willpower to finance them. Developing countries will need a substantial amount of help from richer nations if they are to pay for a UUBI. Some fear that their currencies will depreciate if they act aggressively, potentially spurring a debt crisis. Richer nations will need to work with global financial institutions to offer debt relief and additional resources to developing nations. Many developing countries will need to buy food and medical supplies with hard currency, which will become increasingly difficult because of faltering export earnings and collapsing remittances.

Given the unprecedented collapse in earnings that many people face, conventional fiscal prudence is perhaps less important now than it was in the recent past. Now is the time for governments to help citizens and economies by spending more, rather than less. The governments of developing countries may need to accept large budget deficits in order to finance a UUBI, at least in the short term. When countries begin to loosen their lockdowns and resume production, they will face extremely weak demand. Pledging that cash transfers will continue for some time in the future will allow people to go out and spend money when it becomes safe to do so. In turn, this will drive the revival of the economy.

None of this means that governments should simply ignore concerns about macro-economic stability. But a clear spending plan that responds to the immediate shock of coronavirus, in conjunction with a longer term strategy for how the lockdown will end, offers the best hope for preventing the present crisis developing into a future catastrophe.

The methodical deconstruction of fake facts

Yanis Varoufakis reviewed Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit V Banerjee and Esther Duflo below this headline and the subheading: Two Nobel winners’ down-to-earth diagnosis of global ills is enlightening but fails to address capitalism’s fatal flaws for the Guardian (Mon 11 Nov 2019):

A recent YouGov survey confirmed that economists are among the least trusted professionals in the UK. Brexit is only the latest factor in the public’s rejection of an occupation that has either failed to raise the alarm over impending crises or provided justification for the inexcusable practices of bankers and the wild claims of politicians.

Who can forget the Queen’s devastating question, after the 2008 crash, to members of the Royal Economic Society: “Why did no one see it coming?” How can Nobel prize-winning economists be forgiven for providing the theoretical sermons that helped concoct the structured derivatives that Warren Buffett would later describe as “weapons of mass financial destruction”?

Good Economics for Hard Times is the latest attempt by economists to defend their profession. It is, happily, an excellent antidote to the most dangerous forms of economics bashing: the efforts of opportunistic politicians to weaponise discontent with mainstream politics and to press it into the service of a xenophobic ideology that denies facts and serves the interests of a nativist, global oligarchy.

The book’s authors, MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, write beautifully and are in full command of their subject. They examine the most crucial issues humanity faces (migration, trade wars, the scourge of inequality, climate catastrophe) with a combination of humility over what economics cannot tell us and pride over its contributions to our limited understanding. On every page, they seek to shed much-needed light upon the distortions that bad economics bring to public debates while methodically deconstructing their false assumptions. In their words, the book’s noble, urgent task is “to emphasise that there are no iron laws of economics keeping us from building a more humane world”.

Serendipity would have it that even as Good Economics… was still in the pipeline Banerjee and Duflo, who are also partners in life, were awarded (with Michael Kremer) this year’s Nobel prize in economics. It was an inspired choice. Unlike previous winners, mostly older white males whose grand theories are built upon mathematics of dizzying complexity, they have made a name for themselves by studying the circumstances of the world’s poorest people. Most interestingly, they have specialised in borrowing the methods of randomised trials in medicine and deployed them in developing countries to ascertain which policies can alleviate suffering with given resources.

Their own conception of what economists should be doing is disarmingly down to earth. They see themselves as society’s “plumbers: we solve problems with a combination of intuition grounded in science, some guesswork aided by experience and a bunch of pure trial and error”. A comparison with John Maynard Keynes’s conception of economics is telling. He thought that it required us to be, at once, “mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher”. That we must “contemplate the particular in terms of the general, and touch abstract and concrete in the same flight of thought”. That we must remain “as aloof and incorruptible as an artist, yet sometimes as near the earth as a politician”.

While such lofty ambition implanted a dangerous delusion of grandeur among many of the economists whose theories have caused many people great hardship (for example, grand theorisers of the financial market’s supposed self-correcting capacities), there are passages in Good Economics… when this reader would have liked a little more of Keynes’s ambition. For without it, the plentiful facts do not go far enough in exposing the deeper causes of our current predicament.

The book’s greatest contribution is its methodical deconstruction of fake facts: migration, we learn, is not on the rise – indeed, at 3% of global population, it is at the level it was in 1960. Natural experiments (involving Finns expelled from the USSR in 1945, Cubans flocking to Miami in 1980 and Jews settling in Israel in the 90s) prove that migrants do not steal natives’ jobs; they just help expose the holes in public services and social housing left by austerity. As for trade liberalisation, which economists treat as super-important, Banerjee and Duflo suggest it brings relatively small benefits while doing a lot of damage to the poor in countries such as the US and India. The resulting discontent turbo-charges racism: the moment white blue-collar men lose hope and apply for disability welfare benefits, it is no longer enough for them to denigrate black people and Latinos as “welfare queens”. They must now be depicted as gang members or rapists.

In the chapters on growth, inequality and climate change, the reader comes closer to encountering the authors’ politics. While on the side of progressives such as Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, their own stance is more mainstream. They support schemes to help the victims of globalisation (by paying firms in declining areas to keep older workers employed, for instance). They want governments in developing countries to help people move to areas with better jobs, but also to assist those who want to stay to look after their elderly or their village. They favour the smaller picture, where they can be sure that public investment will make a difference. But what about the larger stage on which humanity’s drama unfolds?

Banerjee and Duflo consider Sanders’s job guarantee scheme but reject it, because they do not believe worthy jobs can be produced by the state in such big numbers. They point out that Warren’s wealth tax, though good and proper, cannot raise more than 1% of US national income, while Ocasio-Cortez’s 70% marginal tax rate for the super-rich will simply motivate firms not to distribute profits but place them in trust funds. Alas, the fact remains that any serious tackling of climate change requires spending in the vicinity of at least 5% of total income. So where will the money needed for the international Green New Deal and the redistribution (both global and local) of wealth that humanity needs so desperately come from? Banerjee and Duflo do not say.

They would welcome a change of heart among IMF staffers: “The IMF now requires its country teams to include inequality in factors to take into consideration when providing policy guidance to countries and outlining conditions under which they can receive IMF assistance.” When I read this, I laughed, thinking that someone must have forgotten to send this email to the IMF’s Greek mission.

Every book as important as this one must include a theory of change: how shall we use its insights to bring about a more humane world? Banerjee and Duflo’s offering is enlightened selfishness by the rich (“The rich may eventually see that it is in their self-interest to argue for a radical shift toward the real sharing of prosperity”) and razor-sharp analysis that is disseminated to the public (“The only course we have against bad ideas is to be vigilant”).

This is unconvincing, but it could not be otherwise. To provide a persuasive progressive policy agenda at a time when the usual fixes (quantitative easing, taxation) no longer work, the roots of capitalism’s stagnation and flirtation with climate catastrophe must come to the surface.

It is a remarkable sign of the times that, as my friend the philosopher Slavoj Žižek once said, even the brightest minds would rather fathom the end of the world than plan for the demise of capitalism. Perhaps the greatest contribution of Good Economics… is precisely this: it demonstrates both the brilliant insights that mainstream economics can make available to us and its limits, which a progressive internationalism has a duty to transcend.

Yanis Varoufakis is a member of Greece’s parliament, where he leads the new MeRA25 party, and a professor of economic theory at the University of Athens. He is also a former finance minister of Greece.

. . . even the brightest minds would rather fathom the end of the world than plan for the demise of capitalism.

Slavoj Žižek

This quote, taken from the review above, by Yanis Varoufakis, is something his friend Slavoj Žižek has said, and Re:LODE Radio says:

How true?

In today's print edition of the Guardian we find an interview with Thomas Piketty, one of the "brightest minds" of our time, set out under a headline phrase, that is, something that could become a slogan for our times:

'We must revive the social state' 

(Tue 12 May 2020) The French economist Thomas Piketty is the bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and its follow-up, Capital and Ideology (2019), a sweep through 1,000 years of the history of inequality.

Speaking to Laura Spinney of the Guardian, he said he had been thinking about the opportunities this pandemic may present to build fairer, more equal societies.

How does this pandemic measure up to historical ones? 

The most pessimistic modelling estimates of the eventual death toll of this pandemic – that is, without any intervention – are about 40 million people globally. That corresponds to about a third of the death toll of the 1918 flu pandemic, adjusted for population. But what’s missing from the models is inequality – the fact that not all social groups are hit in the same way, and importantly, neither are rich and poor countries.

This was revealed by the 1918 flu, where 0.5% to 1% of the population perished in the US and Europe, compared with 6% in India. What is shocking about this pandemic is the very high levels of inequality that it is revealing. We’re also being confronted by the violence of that inequality, because lockdown in a big apartment is not the same as lockdown if you are homeless.

Are western societies more unequal than they were in 1918?

The levels of inequality we see today are much, much lower than what they were a century ago. In a way that is my message. I’m an optimist. The story I tell is a story of learning, of progress in the long term. That progress happened because of political and intellectual movements that set out to build social security and progressive taxation systems, and to transform our system of property. Property was sacrosanct in the 19th century, but it was gradually de-sanctified. Today we have a much better balance of the rights of owners, workers, consumers and local government. That represents a complete transformation in our notion of property, and it was combined with increased access to health and education.

But inequality is greater now than it was in the 1980s. So a correction is needed?

Yes. The right response to this crisis would be to revive the social state in the global north, and to accelerate its development in the global south. This new social state would demand a fair tax system and create an international financial register that would enable it to bring in the largest and richest firms to that system. The present regime of free circulation of capital, set up in the 1980s and 90s under the influence of the richest countries – especially in Europe – encourages evasion by millionaires and multinationals. It prevents poor countries from developing a fair tax system, which in turn undermines their ability to build a social state.

In Capital and Ideology you describe how shocks such as wars and pandemics can drive such corrections. Is it possible that extreme inequality can even provoke such shocks – in other words, that inequality is self-correcting in the long run?

I think there is something to that, yes. In the book I argued that the two world wars were largely the result of the extreme inequality that existed in pre-first world war European societies – both within those societies and internationally, due to their accumulation of colonial assets. That inequality was not sustainable, and it caused those societies to erupt, but they did so in different ways – the first world war, the Russian revolutions, the 1918 pandemic. The pandemic preyed on the poorer sectors of society, with their poor access to healthcare, and it was exacerbated by the war. The result of these cumulative shocks was a compression of inequality over the next half-century.

The main example you give in the book, of a pandemic driving a correction, is the Black Death of the 14th century. What happened after that?

There has long been a theory that the end of serfdom was more or less a consequence of the Black Death. The idea was that with up to 50% of the population wiped out in some regions, labour became scarce and labourers were therefore able to secure better rights and status for themselves, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. In some places, the Black Death actually reinforced serfdom. Precisely because labour was scarce, it became more valuable to landowners who were therefore more motivated to coerce it.

The bottom line, which is relevant today too, is that powerful shocks like pandemics, wars or financial crashes have an impact on society, but the nature of that impact depends on the theories people hold about history, society, the balance of power – in a word, ideology – which varies from place to place. It always takes major social and political mobilisation to move societies in the direction of equality.

Could this pandemic tip us towards the kind of participatory socialism that you recommend?

It’s too early to say, precisely because pandemics can have such contradictory effects on political mobilisation and thinking. At the very least, I think, it will reinforce the legitimacy of public investment in healthcare. But it could also have a completely different kind of impact. Historically, for example, pandemics have triggered xenophobia and nations turning inward. In France, the far-right politician Marine Le Pen is saying that we should not return too quickly to free movement in the European Union. Especially if the final death toll is very high in Europe, as compared to other regions, there is a risk that the anti-European narrative of Trump and Le Pen could gain traction.

What about public debt, which is soaring as a result of this pandemic – won’t governments be forced to act to rein that in?

Yes, that’s likely. When you get to a very high level of public debt, as our European nations and the US have, you need to find unorthodox solutions because repayment is simply too crippling and slow. History offers us plenty of examples of this. In the 19th century, when Britain had to repay its debts from the Napoleonic period, it essentially taxed the lower and middle classes to repay upper-class bondholders. This worked because, at least at the beginning of the 19th century, only rich people could vote.

Today, I don’t think it would work … Following the second world war, on the other hand, Germany and Japan found a different and, to my mind, better solution. They temporarily taxed the wealthy. It worked very well, allowing them to start reconstruction from the mid-1950s without any public debt. Necessity makes you inventive. It could be that to save the eurozone, for example, the European Central Bank will need to take responsibility for a bigger share of member states’ debt. We’ll see.

So it could transform the European Union?

We shouldn’t rely on a crisis to solve the problems that we need to solve, but it could be a stimulus to change. The EU began to fragment with Brexit. It’s a weak explanation of Brexit to say the poor are nationalist. The problem is that if you have free trade and a single currency without social objectives, you end up in a situation in which free mobility of capital benefits the most mobile, high-wealth citizens, and you alienate the middle and lower classes. If you want to keep free movement, it needs to be married to common taxation and common social policies, which could include common investment in health and education. History is instructive here too. Building a welfare state within a nation state was already a huge challenge. It required rich and poor to come to an agreement and a big political fight. Doing it at a transnational level is possible, I think, but it will probably have to be done in a small number of countries first. Others can join later if they buy into the ideology. I hope it can be done without breaking the current EU, and I hope Britain comes back, eventually.

There has been talk of de-globalisation after this crisis. Will it happen?

I think it will happen in some strategic areas, such as medical supplies, just because we need to be better prepared for the next pandemic. There’s more work to be done for it to happen across the board. At the moment, our ideological choice is to have 0% tariffs on international trade, because the fear is that if we start raising tariffs, where will it stop? It’s similar to the 19th-century discussion over the redistribution of property. People preferred to defend even extreme inequality in property ownership – even slave ownership – rather than accept some redistribution, because they were afraid that once unleashed it would end in the expropriation of all property. It’s the slippery slope argument – the classic argument of conservatives throughout history. Today I think we have to get out of this zero-tariff mindset, if only to pay for global threats such as climate change and pandemics, but that means inventing a new narrative about where we stop with tariffs. And again, as history shows us, there is never just one solution.

The triumph of death . . .

The function of this chosen image is to connect the ideas of Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis through the prism of the philosopher, Yanis Varoufakis' friend Slavoj Žižek, who once said, and twice quoted by Re:LODE Radio above; "even the brightest minds would rather fathom the end of the world than plan for the demise of capitalism".

This painting is by Pieter Brueghel (the elder) and is titled The Triumph of Death (1562), and while the image is an assemblage of ideas and references, and is allegorical rather than descriptive, it accurately represents aspects of the "dark times" the artist was living through.

However, this is an art that is NOT about fathoming the "end of the world", it is all about making sense of contemporary "actuality"!

Pieter Brueghel was an artist that Re:LODE Radio considers to be an artist interested in contemporary realities. Everyone experiences their reality, so a wider, or universal view of reality must be inclusive of the multiple realities of all living creatures. If we connect these realities, these individual "bubbles" of experience, a picture of actuality begins to emerge.

For example, in this very different kind of picture by Brueghel of The Harvesters (1565), in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, there are a number of "scenes", probably, difficult to see or apprehend, except when looking at the painting in situ, and for a good period of time, that illustrate how this art of actuality works.

In the centre of the picture, and almost visible in the detail below, a man can be seen, just above the ridge in the field of the pasture, in the act of chasing a cow. In such an action as this, chasing your beast across a field, the subjective reality of the actor is completely shaped by a total involvement in the action. This is a "bubble" of reality within the actuality.

In this same moment, as seen in the detail below, a worker brings two flasks of water to the group temporarily resting from their labours.

The effort of this harvester is conveyed in the suggestion of the gradual climb toward the corn covered hilltop. Perhaps we can imagine this feeling, the feel of the earth's gravity?

In this detail we see one of the harvesters asleep, taking "forty winks" in the noon, and digesting a harvester's midday intake of food and drink. Master Zhuang, a Chinese philosopher, who is supposed to have lived during the Warring States Period, famously says:

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.

Is this sleeper dreaming? If the answer to this question is "yes", then this reality "bubble" is integral to the actuality.

This framing of space and a moment in time in a landscape, connects to our notion of things happening, and depicted as "normal" in cinema, video and the moving image/sound/scape.

This "normal" for the film director Andrei Tarkovsky is the art of:

Sculpting in time . . .

These two paintings by Brueghel are extreme examples of differing, and contrasting, subject matter. The Triumph of Death is a version of the Danse Macabre, whilst the Harvesters is a celebration, rather than an idyll, of bucolic productivity, and the bounty of harvest made possible by hard work, and the fertility of a cultivated landscape. 

Yet, both of these different works share a common approach and artistic purpose. Pieter Brueghel the Elder was the first great example of the artist as an observant participant of the social experience. He was also possessed of the ability to draw an audience into a space, where dialogical thinking, social commentary and social criticism might survive in a hostile ideological environment.

Brueghel's painting of the Triumph of Death, while similar in subject matter to the "dances with death", as in this a detail of the Lübecker Totentanz by Bernt Notke (around 1463, destroyed in a bombing raid in 1942), it extends the possibilities of this theme. In the background to this scene of statue-like notables and their lively (yes, jigging about wildly) companions of death, we can see the cityscape of Lübeck on the horizon. This is the same Lübeck where a LODE cargo was made in 1992, and revisited in questions for Re:LODE Cargo of Questions. In Michael Pye's book The Edge of the World - How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are,  he has a chapter called Dealers rule, about the Hansa cities, including Lübeck, and how the modern trade-off between politics and money began in 1180 with the signing of a treaty between a foreign prince and the Hanseatic League. This is the story of: Money power versus political power

The condition of the actual as Brueghel depicts it is a battle, an event in a war rather than a dance.

The default condition of the actual for Brueghel was determined by the experience of his times, and dominated as it was by war in the service of empire. The deathly horrors of  recurring famines, war, and, most of all, the Black Death, were culturally assimilated throughout Europe. The omnipresent possibility of sudden and painful death increased the religious desire for penance, but it also evoked a hysterical desire for amusement while still possible; a last dance as cold comfort. The danse macabre combines both desires: in many ways similar to the mediaeval mystery plays, the dance-with-death allegory was originally a didactic dialogue poem to remind people of the inevitability of death and to advise them strongly to be prepared at all times for death. For Brueghel, and his contemporaries, the human condition was shaped by what Michel Foucault identifies and sets out in great detail in his lectures at the Collège de France: "Society Must Be Defended" (1975–1976). The Wikipedia article on these lectures points out that it is all about how power (as Foucault saw it) becomes a battleground drifting from civil war to generalized pacification of the individual and particularly the systems he (the individual) relies upon and to which he gives loyalty:

"According to this hypothesis, the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to re-inscribe that relationship of force, and to re-inscribe it in institutions, economic inequalities, language, and even the bodies of individuals."

Foucault begins to explain that this generalized form of power is not only rooted in Disciplinary institutions but is also concentrated in "political sovereignty, the military, and war," so it is in turn spread evenly throughout modern society as a network of domination.  

But no mortal can escape the great leveller of death, be they bishop, prince or peasant.

Echoes of this can be found in the existential condition of European culture and are evident in modern drama. For example: The Seventh Seal, the 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Set in Sweden during the Black Death, it tells of the journey of a medieval knight and a game of chess he plays with the personification of Death, who has come to take his life.

"It is a modern poem presented with medieval material that has been very freely handled... The script in particular—embodies a mid-twentieth century existentialist angst... Still, to be fair to Bergman, one must allow him his artistic license, and the script's modernisms may be justified as giving the movie's medieval theme a compelling and urgent contemporary relevance... Yet the film succeeds to a large degree because it is set in the Middle Ages, a time that can seem both very remote and very immediate to us living in the modern world... Ultimately The Seventh Seal should be judged as a historical film by how well it combines the medieval and the modern."

John Aberth (2003). A Knight at the Movies. Routledge. pp. 217–218.

Scott Walker retells the story in song . . .

Concision at its best - Scott Walker - The Seventh Seal

Scott Walker retells Ingmar Bergman's 1957 masterpiece in just under 5 minutes. This track can be found on "Scott 4" (1969), Scott Walker's fifth solo album (a collection of songs he had performed for his BBC television series had been his fourth). It was originally released in late 1969 under his birth name, Noel Scott Engel, and failed to chart. Subsequent reissues have been released under his stage name. It has since received praise as one of Walker's best works.

Returning now to the Thomas Piketty interview and this question and answer:

Q. The main example you give in the book, of a pandemic driving a correction, is the Black Death of the 14th century. What happened after that?

A. Piketty's answer includes an interesting qualification on the usual assumption that: "with up to 50% of the population wiped out in some regions, labour became scarce and labourers were therefore able to secure better rights and status for themselves, but it turns out to be more complicated than that. In some places, the Black Death actually reinforced serfdom. Precisely because labour was scarce, it became more valuable to landowners who were therefore more motivated to coerce it."

There is a chapter in the book The Edge of the World - How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are, by Michael Pye  called The plague laws, that vividly sets out some of these "complexities", complexities that reveal what Michel Foucault called a network of domination. 

Q. What were these plague laws?

A. The beginning of a coercive English labour law!

The Ordinance of Labourers 1349 is often considered to be the start of English labour law. Specifically, it fixed wages and imposed price controls; required all those under the age of 60 to work; prohibited the enticing away of another's servants; and:

No one, under the pain of imprisonment, was to give any thing to able-bodied beggars 'under the color of pity or alms'.

The ordinance was issued in response to the 1348−1350 outbreak of the Black Death in England. During this outbreak, an estimated 30−40% of the population died. The decline in population left surviving workers in great demand in the agricultural economy of Britain.

Landowners had to face the choice of raising wages to compete for workers or letting their lands go unused. Wages for labourers rose and translated into inflation across the economy as goods became more expensive to produce. The wealthy elites suffered under the sudden economic shift. Difficulties in hiring labour created frustration. The poet John Gower commented on post-plague labourers: "they are sluggish, they are scarce, and they are grasping. For the very little they do they demand the highest pay." Labourers once ate bread made of beans, drank water, wore grey, then according to Gower; was the world of such folk well-ordered in its estate. 

On the other hand, while some workers suffered from increasing prices, others benefited from the higher wages they could command during this period of labour shortage.

To quote from Michael Pye's chapter on The plague laws:

Now there were fewer of them, they had drinks besides water, they wanted decent food and a good wage, they dressed well, they had money for beds and pillows: they went poaching and even hunting. Gower worried about who would grow the food on which city people depended since "scarcely a rustic wishes to do such work; instead he wickedly loafs everywhere".

The thirteenth-century Bartholomaeus Anglicus, from the universities of Paris and Oxford, had warned about this. The peasantry, he said, usually kept down by various and clashing duties and charges, living with wretchedness and woe, would change if ever their circumstances changed: they would 'wax stout and proud'.  

Workers now thought they could choose where to be, which master to serve, how much would be a fair wage. In his chronicle, Henry Knighton complained that workers were 'arrogant and obstinate' for wanting higher wages when the cost of food was soaring. A French labour law of 1354 expresses great crossness at those who worked 'whenever it pleased them, and spending the rest of their time in taverns playing games and enjoying themselves'. This was not just an irritant; it was a threat. A petition to the English Parliament in 1377 warned of peasants making 'confederation and alliance together to resist the lords and their officials by force'. When the peasants did march on Mile end in 1381 to present their own petition to the king, they demanded that 'no man should serve any man except at his own will'.

Everyone had to be fixed in place because the poor would never have chosen theirs. It was generally agreed that work was a punishment for Adam's fall from grace, and if nature refused to co-operate with man it was because sin had corrupted the weather, the soil and the natural world. Being poor brought no spiritual rewards unless you chose to be poor, and no great improvement, either; peasants seemed to have much the same anger, pride and greed as barons. Being poor was just wretched; an early fourteenth-century poem, the Song of the Husbandman, suggests 'we might as well die now as struggle on like this'. The poor were not even attractive; Henry Grosmont, Duke of Lancaster, had to confess he did not like the way they smelled. He prayed for forgiveness for his reaction, but still he found them distasteful.

When in the thirteenth century peasants made brief appearance in the new stained glass of cathedrals like Chartres and Le Mans, they were shown being busy where the donor of the glass would usually be, but only because they were shorthand for the gift of a vineyard or some land that had paid for the window, so their labour was support for the church. By the fourteenth century, even this sort of dependency was too much to acknowledge; peasants went back to the margins of lovely manuscripts for the delight of rich individuals.

They were shown doing easy , orderly chores in perfect weather, rarely in groups of more than two and dedicated to the job. The English market, having had quite enough of rebellious peasants, was particularly keen on this vision of order.

The language about workers began to sound curiously modern. In William Langland's great poem about Piers Plowman and his allegorical quest to save the world, there are 'shirkers' that Piers threatens with starvation, but their only response is to fake failing eyesight and twisted limbs, all the tricks that, he says, 'layabouts' know. The character Waster, the worst of the lot, is deeply unimpressed by anything that Piers can threaten to get the people to bring in the harvest; he says he doesn't give a damn for the law or any knights authority, or Piers and his plough, and what's more he will beat up the lot if he ever sees them again. Workless is lawless; some of the poor are undeserving. You can't believe a cripple when he says he finds walking difficult. the world is fill of idle people who must be goaded into action. Nobody respects old Romans like Cato any more, or his instruction to those born poor: 'Bear your poverty with patience.' This new kind of labourer wants hot food at mid-day and a 'lordly' wage, or else he feels exploited. in the end it is only the presence of Hunger, the memory of terrible famines and the fact that food was always scarce at the end of summer when last years grain was finished and this year's crop was not yet reaped which drives men to the threshing floor.

In the summer of 1349, the harvest was rotting in the English fields because of 'the many people, and especially workers and servants, now dead in the pestilence'. The answer was law: the Ordinance of Labourers and then the Statute of Labourers. Wages and prices were to be controlled and labour contracts were to be long, public and unbreakable; those were not new rules, and they were mostly directed at ploughman and country workers and thos who paid them. The law mentioned tailors, saddlers, goldsmiths, blacksmiths and shoemakers but they were not the ones who were prosecuted; it left out the professionals like notaries whose fees were controlled by law elsewhere, in particular the laws that King John II proposed for the Île de France around the same time. But the next provision was quite extraordinary: anyone with nothing else to do could be 'bound to serve anyone who require his or her services, as long as the service is appropriate to his or her estate'. Anyone under sixty, woman or man, bonded or free, had to obey, and to accept the wages being paid before the plague arrived when there was no shortage of labour. Anyone who failed to accept the work went to jail until they had a change of mind.

This was something entirely new. There were still some slaves, mostly working for foreigners, but this is not slavery; nobody owns anybody else, but nobody controls his own labour any more, either. Peasants might hold land in return for doing work, which was not exactly an arrangement freely negotiated, but it was at least akin to some kind of payment on a lease. There were serfs, of course, who kept the great estates going with their unpaid labour and only sometimes held land in return; but this new law was not directed at serfs. Indeed, serfs had one of the few defences against compulsion; William Meere in 1352 told a court that he was already the serf of the prior of Boxgrove and so he could not possibly be required to work for anyone else. 

There was a means test: anyone who did not have enough land or money or goods could be pushed into service. That does not mean paid work; in service , you got shelter and food and if you were lucky a bit of cash when the contract was finished. Otherwise, you were tied.

People who themselves had servants could be caught by the rules, like Agnes, wife of a shepherd who had already been in court because he had the nerve to demand 'excessive' wages; she was odered to come and hoe the corn of John Maltby, refused, and 'she also did not permit her two maidservants to do this work'. Neighbours in nearby houses could suddenly be labelled vagrants, and a person could be judged idle if she or he was happy to work for daily wages but did not want a long term contract. The law was determined to settle a whole society down; no kindness to 'unworthy beggars', no travel for beggars or workers without letters of authorization.

All this was managed with one more new idea: summary punishment, no need to prove a case in court or even hold a trial. There had to be two witnesses to a refusal to serve, but once they had told their story anyone refusing work could be put in the stocks or taken off to jail, where they stayed until they agreed to labour.

Pages 275-278 The Edge of the World - How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are, by Michael Pye  in the chapter called The plague laws.

Re:LODE Radio returns to the beginning of this post to remind the reader of the Prime Minister of New Zealand's practical alternative to formulating a law;

determined to settle a whole society down; no kindness to 'unworthy beggars', no travel for beggars or workers without letters of authorization.

As the Re:LODE Radio reader will have already noticed, Michael Pye remarks that during the period of the creation of this coercive law: The language about workers began to sound curiously modern.

Views from the north . . . 

The Guardian published two "letters to the editor" from correspondents from the "North" of England, one from Newcastle upon Tyne and another from Liverpool.

These two letters were published on line (Thu 7 May 2020) under the headline:
Beware Tory narrative of a workshy public

A new and entirely predictable narrative is now emerging from the government. It started in the Sunday Times where Boris Johnson is reported as being surprised by the number of people not going to work.

This was followed by Sir Graham Brady stating in parliament that employees had been “too willing” to stay at home (Anger at UK lockdown easing plans ‘that could put workers at risk’, 4 May). Now we have reports of Rishi Sunak believing that the country has become addicted to furlough and he is looking for an exit strategy.

What exactly does the government not understand from its own advice to “stay home”? We already have the highest death toll in Europe, now we are told the policies implemented to avoid more deaths need to be lifted because we the public are abusing them.

With the economy in lockdown, and millions not working and worried about the future, the last thing we need is the traditional Tory accusations that their own failures are actually the fault of a workshy public.
Lee Cornish
Newcastle upon Tyne

It looks as though Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 committee, has let slip the narrative that this government is going to push to divert attention from its costly mishandling of the coronavirus crisis.

Presumably he read the podium exhortation to “stay home, protect the NHS, save lives”. Presumably he heard his colleagues repeat this countless times, yet in the House of Commons on Monday he said that “in some instances it may be that the public have been a little bit too willing to stay at home”.

The public stayed home, as directed, as a public service. Those deemed essential risked their lives when they left their homes to try to keep the rest of us safe. Many minimum-waged essential workers have borne the brunt of austerity since the government bailed out the bankers.

Now it looks as though the new narrative is going to be that these shirkers who were “too willing to stay at home” have bankrupted the economy, so it is perfectly reasonable that they pay for it with another 10 years of disparate austerity. Please don’t fall for it.
Nick Broadhead
Liverpool

The Guardian interview with Thomas Piketty works against the background idea that crisis and catastrophe offers hope for change, change for the better, what used to be called progress.

The lessons learned from the medieval, late medieval and the so-called renaissance period of Europe's history are not encouraging when it comes to the sovereign state as actor. Michael Pye says:

The greatest resistance to the coercive English labour laws came from the people paying the wages, who knew how hard it was to find workers and keep them. they paid the official wage, of course, for the sake of appearances, often put that amount in to their accounts, but that was only the start. they also found extra payments for threshing, gifts of wheat, food and drink at midday, a bonus for working in the rain: all put down to general expenses but going to the workers.

Employers were very aware that workers thought they had choices, the main one being to go and work elsewhere, or have a holiday when there was enough money for the year.

Pages 279-280 The Edge of the World - How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are, by Michael Pye  in the chapter called The plague laws.

Michael Pye's account in The plague laws stresses how during this period of crisis followed by catastrophe, the powers of the state across Europe, be it the sovereign state of free city authority, the status quo would be maintained. There would be laws about the peasant workers spending money, especially on clothes, because clothes are a powerful sign and driver for social transformation.

Power and appearances!

In managing the domestic sphere in later generations of "gentlefolk" during the period of industrial mass production of textiles in the nineteenth century, domestic servants were required to wear a "uniform". This was because social distinctions within the household would blur uncontrollably when domestic servants began to be able to afford to buy and wear clothes that had some equivalence to the quality and fashion style worn by the mistress of the house.

The so called "gentlefolk" of the late fourteenth century were appalled to see some "wretched knave that goes to the plough and the cart, that has nothing but makes his living year by year . . . now he must have a fresh doublet of five shillings or more the price, and above a costly gown with bags hanging to his knee."

The well dressed peasant in the painting of 1568 shown above, and by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, is called The Peasant and the Nest Robber. The painting includes the depiction of a "gesture", that could well be, considering Brueghel's first hand knowledge of Italian art, a profane parody of the gesture of Leonardo's St John. Painted the year before the artist's death, this painting, like other late works such as The Land of Cockaigne, The Peasant Dance, and The Peasant Wedding, is dominated by monumental figures. Immediately after his return from Italy around 1555, Brueghel showed no apparent interest in Italian figure types and compositions, reverting to the Antwerp tradition in which he had been trained. However, in these late works he shows that his study of Italian painting had taken root: these figures demonstrate his knowledge of Italian art and in particular the art of Michelangelo. 

The painting of The peasant and the Nest Robber is an unusual subject, and Re:LODE Radio suspects that it contains a deliberately subversive message, even though it simply illustrates a Netherlandish proverb:

Dije den nest Weet dijen weeten, dijen Roft dij heeten

He who knows where the nest is, has the knowledge, he who robs, has the nest.

Why this proverb?

Interpretations include the obvious, that the painting presents a moralising contrast between the active, wicked individual and the passive man who is virtuous in spite of adversity. A possible subversive element is less obvious. Whilst the pointing man is making judgement on the robber, apparently unaware that he is nearly stepping into the water in front of him, he is also reckless in that the momentum of his physical movement could have him tumble forward, out of the frame, into the privileged space occupied by a passive audience. The drama of the moment and gesture is the peasant's physical confidence as he advances, together with the possibility that the gesture suggests the robber is right, because it is common sense, to an active worker, to resist the injustices of the established order of property ownership.

Two and half centuries earlier, in England, as Michael Pye says: 

The law tried to stop the working classes buying their way out of their proper station. likewise, in 1390, the law stopped 'any kind of artificer or labourer' from hunting 'beasts of the forest, hares or rabbits or other sport of gentlefolk'. The scaffolding of society, having rusted a bit and even fallen, was being put back; 'gentlefolk' were becoming a protected class. By English law in 13 88, servants and labourers who had gone travelling were made to return to their home villages, 'to work at whatever occupation they had formerly undertaken'; an old familiar world was being restored. A man who persisted in moving faced prison and, at least in theory, branding on his forehead: the letter 'F' for 'Falsity'.

Page 280 The Edge of the World - How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are, by Michael Pye  in the chapter called The plague laws.

On the matter of Justice and Power we have access, at the moment, to a video on YouTube of the Dutch TV-televised Foucault Noam Chomsky Human nature Justice versus Power debate of November 1971 at the Eindhoven University of Technology. This is a fascinating document of modern intellectual history. There is a useful excerpt from this debate where Noam Chomsky posits his view of a social framework that is capable of enabling the essential values of human nature to thrive.

From Foucault to Chomsky, the coercive state and Justice versus Power . . .

A few clips from this classic 1971 debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault on justice and power. Among other things, Foucault suggests that there is no fixed, ahistorical notion of human nature, as posited by Chomsky’s concept of innate human faculties. Chomsky argues that concepts of justice are rooted in human nature and reason, whereas Foucault rejects any such universal basis for a concept of justice.

Noam Chomsky, as a proponent of anarchism, has acknowledged the intellectual influence and political legacy of the work of Rudolf Rocker (1873 – 1958), a German anarchist writer and activist. Though often described as an anarcho-syndicalist, Rocker was a self-professed anarchist without adjectives, believing that anarchist schools of thought represented "only different methods of economy" and that the first objective for anarchists was "to secure the personal and social freedom of men".

Rudolf Rocker's political and intellectual activities led to a life that involved migration between Europe and North America on many occasions. His story includes a Liverpool connection. Fleeing to Paris from Mainz, and his native Germany in 1892, to avoid arrest for political activism, and conscription, where he made his first contact with Jewish anarchism. In Spring 1893, he was invited to a meeting of Jewish anarchists, which he attended and was impressed by. Though neither a Jew by birth nor by belief, he ended up frequenting the group's meeting, eventually holding lectures himself. Solomon Rappaport, later known as S. Ansky, allowed Rocker to live with him, as they were both typographers and could share Rappaport's tools. During this period, Rocker also first came into contact with the blending of anarchist and syndicalist ideas represented by the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), which would influence him in the long term. In 1895, as a result of the anti-anarchist sentiment in France, Rocker traveled to London to visit the German consulate and examine the possibility of his returning to Germany but was told he would be imprisoned upon return. Rocker decided to stay in London. He got a job as the librarian of the Communist Workers' Educational Union, where he got to know Louise Michel, a veteran of the Paris Commune, and Errico Malatesta, two influential anarchists. Inspired to visit the quarter after reading about "Darkest London" in the works of John Henry Mackay, he was appalled by the poverty he witnessed in the predominantly Jewish East End. He joined the Jewish anarchist Arbeter Fraint group he had obtained information about from his French comrades, quickly becoming a regular lecturer at its meetings. There, he met his lifelong companion Milly Witkop, a Ukrainian-born Jew who had fled to London in 1894. In May 1897, having lost his job and with little chance of re-employment, Rocker was persuaded by a friend to move to New York. Witkop agreed to accompany him and they arrived on the 29th. They were, however, not admitted into the country, because they were not legally married. They refused to formalize their relationship. Rocker explained that their "bond is one of free agreement between my wife and myself. It is a purely private matter that only concerns ourselves, and it needs no confirmation from the law." Witkop added: "Love is always free. When love ceases to be free it is prostitution." The matter received front-page coverage in the national press. The Commissioner-General of Immigration, the former Knights of Labor President Terence V. Powderly, advised the couple to marry to settle the matter, but they refused and were deported back to England on the same ship they had arrived on. Unable to find employment upon return, Rocker decided to move to Liverpool. A former Whitechapel comrade of his persuaded him to become the editor of a recently founded Yiddish weekly newspaper called Dos Fraye Vort (The Free Word), even though he did not speak the language at the time. The newspaper only appeared for eight issues, but it led the Arbeter Fraint group to re-launch its eponymous newspaper and invite Rocker to return to the capital and take over as its editor. 

The coercive state . . .

Re:LODE Radio is conscious of the extensive use of contiguous, as in "touching", connections being employed in this post. 

Please be patient. Hold on to the connections. This is not "going off at a tangent", it is to avoid creating too thin an information base for necessary dialogic thinking appropriate to the moment of a double crisis:

Crisis one, the Covid-19 pandemic! 
Crisis two, the climate emergency! 

If we consider the "slogan" associated with the Thomas Piketty interview:

'We must revive the social state' . . .

. . . we need contextual information, NOT concision!

Noam Chomsky has discussed this on many occasions in his works and interviews. Here for example, in an interview with Harry Kreisler at the Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley:

HK You said somewhere, I think in this new book on power, "You can lie or distort the story of the French Revolution as long as you like and nothing will happen. Propose a false theory in chemistry and it will be refuted tomorrow."

NC Yes, that's the kind of thing I mean. Nature is tough. You can't fiddle with Mother Nature, she's a hard taskmistress. So you're forced to be honest in the natural sciences. In the soft fields, you're not forced to be honest. There are standards, of course; on the other hand, they're very weak. If what you propose is ideologically acceptable, that is, supportive of power systems, you can get away with a huge amount. In fact, the difference between the conditions that are imposed on dissident opinion and on mainstream opinion are radically different. I'll give you a concrete example, if you like.

HK Yes, do that.

NC Okay. For example, I've written about terrorism, and I think you can show without much difficulty that terrorism pretty much corresponds to power. I don't think that's very surprising.book cover The more powerful states are involved in more terrorism, by and large. The United States is the most powerful, so it's involved in massive terrorism, by its own definition of terrorism. Well, if I want to establish that, I'm required to give a huge amount of evidence. I think that's a good thing. I don't object to that. I think anyone who makes that claim should be held to very high standards. So extensive documentation, and from the internal secret records and historical record and so on. And if you ever find a comma misplaced, somebody ought to criticize you for it. So I think those standards are fine.

All right, now, let's suppose that you play the mainstream game. For example, the Yale University Press just came out with a volume called The Age of Terror. The contributors are leading historians, many of them at Yale, the top people in the field. You read the book The Age of Terror, the first thing you notice is there isn't a single footnote, there isn't a single reference. There are just off-the-top-of-your-head statements. Some of the statements are tenable, some are untenable, but there are no intellectual criteria imposed. The reviews of the book are very favorable, laudatory, and maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong. I happen to think a lot of it is wrong and demonstrably wrong. But doesn't really matter, you can say anything you want because you support power, and nobody expects you to justify anything. For example, on the unimaginable circumstance that I was on, say, Nightline, and I was asked, say, "Do you think Kadhafi is a terrorist?" I could say, "Yeah, Kadhafi is a terrorist." I don't need any evidence. Suppose I said, "George Bush is a terrorist." Well, then I would be expected to provide evidence, "Why would you say that?"

HK So that you aren't cut off right there.

NC In fact, the structure of the news production system is, you can't produce evidence. There's even a name for it -- I learned it from the producer of Nightline, Jeff Greenfield. It's called "concision." He was asked in an interview somewhere why they didn't have me on Nightline, and his answer was -- two answers. First of all, he says, "Well, he talks Turkish, and nobody understands it." But the other answer was, "He lacks concision." Which is correct, I agree with him. The kinds of things that I would say on Nightline, you can't say in one sentence because they depart from standard religion. If you want to repeat the religion, you can get away with it between two commercials. If you want to say something that questions the religion, you're expected to give evidence, and that you can't do between two commercials. So therefore you lack concision, so therefore you can't talk.

Re:LODE Radio chooses to emphasise the last part of this excerpt from the interview, because we are in the middle of World War III, and it's a war of information.

I think that's a terrific technique of propaganda. To impose concision is a way of virtually guaranteeing that the party line gets repeated over and over again, and that nothing else is heard.

Anarchism and the coercive state . . .

In 1933 Rudolf Rocker and Milly Witkop left Germany for the last time on March 8, arriving in Basel, Switzerland, by the last train to cross the border without being searched. Two weeks later, Rocker and his wife joined Emma Goldman in St. Tropez, France. There he wrote Der Weg ins Dritte Reich (The Path to the Third Reich) about the events in Germany, but it would only be published in Spanish.
In May, Rocker and Witkop moved back to London. There Rocker was welcomed by many of the Jewish anarchists he had lived and fought alongside for many years. He held lectures all over the city. In July, he attended an extraordinary IWA meeting in Paris, which decided to smuggle its organ Die Internationale into Nazi Germany.

On August 26, 1933, Rocker with his wife emigrated to New York. The Rocker family moved to live with a sister of Witkop's in Towanda, Pennsylvania where many families with progressive or libertarian socialist views lived. In October, Rocker toured the US and Canada speaking about racism, fascism, dictatorship, socialism in English, Yiddish, and German. He found many of his Jewish comrades from London, who had since emigrated to America, and became a regular writer for Freie Arbeiter Stimme, a Jewish anarchist newspaper.

He was working on Nationalism and Culture, when the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936 instilling great optimism in Rocker. He published a pamphlet The Truth about Spain and contributed to The Spanish Revolution, a special fortnightly newspaper published by American anarchists to report on the events in Spain. In 1937, he wrote The Tragedy of Spain, which analyzed the events in greater detail. In September 1937, Rocker and Witkop moved to the libertarian commune Mohegan Colony about 50 miles (80 km) from New York City.

In 1937, at the behest of Emma Goldman, he penned the seminal text Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice. An Introduction to a Subject Which the Spanish War Has Brought into Overwhelming Prominence as an introduction to the ideals fueling the Spanish social revolution and resistance to capitalism and fascism the world over. Its first edition (158 pages) was published by Secker and Warburg, London in 1938.

In this book Rocker offers an introduction to anarchist ideas, a history of the international workers' movement, and an outline of the syndicalist strategies and tactics embraced at the time (direct action, sabotage and the general strike). The Pluto Press and the newest AK Press editions include a lengthy introduction by Nicolas Walter and a preface by Noam Chomsky.

Anarcho-syndicalism

This is Wikipedia' introductory summary of Anarcho-syndicalism:

Anarcho-syndicalism is a political philosophy and anarchist school of thought that views revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism as a method for workers in capitalist society to gain control of an economy and thus control influence in broader society. The end goal of syndicalism is to abolish the wage system, regarding it as wage slavery. Anarcho-syndicalist theory therefore generally focuses on the labour movement.

The basic principles of anarcho-syndicalism are solidarity, direct action (action undertaken without the intervention of third parties such as politicians, bureaucrats and arbitrators) and direct democracy, or workers' self-management. Syndicalists consider their economic theories a strategy for facilitating worker self-activity and as an alternative co-operative economic system with democratic values and production centered on meeting human needs. Anarcho-syndicalists view the primary purpose of the state as being the defense of private property in the forms of capital goods and therefore of economic, social and political privilege, denying most of its citizens the ability to enjoy material independence and the social autonomy that springs from it.

Reflecting the anarchist philosophy from which it draws its primary inspiration, anarcho-syndicalism is centred on the idea that power corrupts and that any hierarchy that cannot be ethically justified must either be dismantled or replaced by decentralized egalitarian control.

This article continues, and includes much that relates to the role of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo and the twentieth century history of Spain, especially the situation in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. 

The image below is from the German leftist weekly ‘Worker’s Illustrated Newspaper’ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung) which was published from 1921 to 1938, latterly from Czechoslovakia, and is by German artist John Heartfeld. This is an artist who lived his political art on the edge.

“This is the Salvation They Are Bringing Us!”

In response to the aerial bombardment of civilian populations in the Spanish Civil War, this photomontage by Dada artist John Heartfeld, offers a startlingly prescient indictment of the death and destruction to which Nazi war-mongering would soon lead. The image features a frightening skeletal hand, presumably in the form of the Hitler salute. The fingers of the hand are delineated by the dark exhaust of fighter planes. Bombed out, charred buildings are visible on the right; civilian war victims (including children) are seen on the left. The caption underneath reads: “This is the Salvation They Are Bringing Us!” - “Das ist das Heil, das sie bringen!”. Here, the word for salvation, "Heil" is a reference to the Nazi salute to Hitler, “Sieg Heil”. Published a year before the start of the Second World War, this photomontage unmasks Hitler’s missionary zeal to “unify the Reich” as reckless war-mongering.

In Rudolf Rocker's intoduction to the introduction, as it were, and contemporaneous to the Spanish Civil War:

Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice. An Introduction to a Subject Which the Spanish War Has Brought into Overwhelming Prominence;

. . . and quoted directly in this section from the document link above, sets out an historical overview that is as extensive and wide ranging, as it is also particular in pointing to significant precursors to the modern theory and practice of anarchist ideology. The Introduction begins with these paragraphs:

Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our times, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society. In place of the present capitalistic economic order Anarchists would have a free association of all productive forces based upon co-operative labour, which would have as its sole purpose the satisfying of the necessary requirements of every member of society, and would no longer have in view the special interest of privileged minorities within the social union.

In place of the present state organisation with their lifeless machinery of political and bureaucratic institutions Anarchists desire a federation of free communities which shall be bound to one another by their common economic and social interest and shall arrange their affairs by mutual agreement and free contract.

Anyone who studies at all profoundly the economic and social development of the present social system will easily recognise that these objectives do not spring from the Utopian ideas of a few imaginative innovators, but that they are the logical outcome of a thorough examination of the present-day social maladjustments, which with every new phase of the existing social conditions manifest themselves more plainly and more unwholesomely. Modern monopoly, capitalism and the totalitarian state are merely the last terms in a development which could culminate in no other results.

The portentous development of our present economic system, leading to a mighty accumulation of social wealth in the hands of privileged minorities and to a continuous impoverishment of the great masses of the people, prepared the way for the present political and social reaction. and befriended it in every way. It sacrificed the general interest of human society to the private interest of individuals, and thus systematically undermined the relationship between man and man. People forgot that industry is not an end in itself, but should only be a means to ensure to man his material subsistence and to make accessible to him the blessings of a higher intellectual culture. Where industry is everything and man is nothing begins the realm of a ruthless economic despotism whose workings are no less disastrous than those of any political despotism. The two mutually augment one another, and they are fed from the same source.

This account of Anarcho-Syndicalism then sets out some precursors to the movement, what we might call "Anarchists before the word". Forerunners of modern Anarchism that Rocker mentions include; William Godwin and his work on Political Justice; P.J. Proudhon and his ideas of political and economic decentralisation. Rocker also takes a global historical overview in this paragraph:

Anarchist ideas are to be found in every period of known history, although there still remains a good deal of work for historical work in this field. We encounter them in the Chinese sage, Lao-Tse (The Course and The Right Way) and in the later Greek philosophers, the Hedonists and Cynics and other advocates of so-called “natural right,” and in particular in Zeno who, at the opposite pole from Plato, founded the Stoic school. They found expression in the teaching of the Gnostic, Karpocrates, in Alexandria, and had an unmistakable influence on certain Christian sects of the Middle Ages in France, Germany and Holland, almost all of which fell victims to the most savage persecutions. In the history of the Bohemian reformation they found a powerful champion in Peter Chelcicky, who in his work, “The Net of Faith,” passed the same judgement on the church and the state as Tolstoy did later. Among the great humanists there was Rabelais, who in his description of the happy Abbey of Thélème (Gargantua) presented a picture of life freed from all authoritarian restraints. 

In making reference to earlier manifestations of this type of social alternative to existing power structures in the example of the Bohemian Reformation, Re:LODE Radio is reminded of some of the questions raised in the recent 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH":

Apocalyse Now in 2020 "THE YEAR OF TRUTH"

In this section of the post the concept of "revelation" is explored under the title:

Fact and or fiction?

However the apocalypse, revelation, or "seeing things as they actually are", is also associated with a more positive, revolutionary and transformative scenario, that in the medieval period generated collective efforts to create perfection on the planet Earth, a period of peace to last a thousand years before a final judgement day. Rather than wait for divine judgement and a destination in heaven or hell, these Millenarianism movements, including religious, social, or political groups (from Latin mīllēnārius "containing a thousand), were driven in the belief in a coming fundamental transformation of society, after which;

"all things will be changed". 

This is a collective mind set focused on real change, and requiring radical and revolutionary change to the system of power. In the middle ages this involved creating autonomous social and political space for what Norman Cohn described as anarcho-syndicalist communities. See Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957, revised and expanded in 1970) an amazing study of millenarian cult movements.

Covering a wide span of time, Cohn's book discusses topics such as anti-Semitism and the Crusades, in addition to such sects as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, flagellants, the Anabaptists, and the Ranters.

The Pursuit of the Millennium concludes with a discussion of the theocratic king John of Leiden, who took over the city of Münster in 1534.

The context of power, and the abuse of power then, and which was clearly visible, included the church, principalities, kingdoms and empires. Today it is global capitalism, a far more complex and often invisible force.

See more and listen to Norman Cohn . . .

If you listen to Norman Cohn speaking about these millenarianist movements it becomes a lot clearer why, in a European context at least, the radical community is seen by the powers that be as a potentially extreme opponent. An enemy! 

Just as "Anarchists" are the "Enemy", so the European millenarians who believed in the imminent coming of Christ's Kingdom on Earth, set about preparing for the day through anarcho-syndicalist methods.

The point that Re:LODE Radio is underlining here is that social transformation, revolution in fact, can be achieved as the result of collective agreement, cooperation, and the sharing of a common purpose. It is also the case, history shows, that in the conflicts and reaction instigated by rebellion there are similar destructive forces at work, that are characteristic of the structures of existing power relations in society, and have been re-inforced in the battle for survival, and, on occasions, replicate injustice with equal ferocity.

The extinction of rebellion . . .

One way to explore this history is through storytelling. There is a fictional version of this history in the 1999 experimental novel Q by Luther Blissett, although this is a multiple-use name, a nom de plume for four Italian authors (Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, Federico Guglielmi and Luca Di Meo) who were part of the "Luther Blissett Project", which ended in 1999. They now write under the name Wu Ming. This "open pop star", or "Neoism", was informally adopted and shared by hundreds of artists and activists all over Europe and the Americas from 1994. The Wikipedia article introduces the definition of "Neoism" as:

Neoism is a parodistic -ism. It refers both to a specific subcultural network of artistic performance and media experimentalists, and, more generally, to a practical underground philosophy. It operates with collectively shared pseudonyms and identities, pranks, paradoxes, plagiarism and fakes, and has created multiple contradicting definitions of itself in order to defy categorization and historization 

Accordingly all and any definition of Neoism will always be disputed. The main source of this is the undefinable concept of Neoism which created vastly different, tactically distorted accounts of Neoism and its history. Undisputed, however, are the origins of the movement in late 1970s Canada. It was instigated by Hungarian-born Canadian performance and media-artist Istvan Kantor (aka Monty Cantsin) in 1979, in Montreal. At around the same time the open-pop-star identity of Monty Cantsin was spread through the Mail Artist David Zack with the collaboration of artists Maris Kudzins and performance artist Istvan Kantor.

Predictable schisms followed in the mid-1980s. Questions and concerns arose about whether the "open pop star" Monty Cantsin moniker was being overly associated with certain individuals. Later, writer Stewart Home sought to separate himself from the rest of the Neoist network, manifesting itself in Home's books on Neoism as opposed to the various Neoist resources in the Internet. In non-Neoist terms, Neoism could be called an international subculture which in the beginning put itself into simultaneous continuity and discontinuity with, among others, experimental arts such as Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus and Conceptual Art, punk, industrial music and electropop, political and religious free-spirit movements, Science Fiction literature, 'Pataphysics and speculative science. Neoism also gathered players with backgrounds in graffiti and street performance, language writing (later known as language poetry), experimental film and video, Mail Art, the early Church of the Subgenius and gay and lesbian culture. Neoism then gradually transformed from an active subculture into a self-written urban legend. As a side effect, many other subcultures, artistic and political groups since the late 1980s have—often vaguely—referred to or even opposed Neoism and thereby perpetuated its myth. 

Since the gradual disappearance of Neoism in the 1990s, brief offshoots have appeared including The Seven by Nine Squares, Stewart Home's frequent use of Karen Eliot (as well as Sandy Larson, Luther Blissett (nom de plume) and others) to replace Monty Cantsin as the embodiment of the open pop star concept. "This project... confuses the restrictions that both define and delimit individual identity.... Changing details, such as biographical particulars... are usually considered indispensible in securing the signature of an individual."

The pseudonym Luther Blissett first appeared in Bologna, Italy, in mid-1994, when a number of cultural activists began using it for staging a series of urban and media pranks and to experiment with new forms of authorship and identity. From Bologna the multiple-use name spread to other European cities, such as Rome and London, as well as countries such as Germany, Spain, and Slovenia. Sporadic appearances of Luther Blissett have been also noted in Canada, the United States, Finland and Brazil.

The pseudonym was borrowed from a real-life Luther Blissett, a notable association football player, who played for A.C. Milan, Watford F.C. and England in the 1980s. The reasons the group chose the name remain unclear to mainstream journalists (e.g. the BBC suggested that Blissett, one of the first black footballers to play in Italy, may have been chosen to make a statement against right-wing extremists in the country). It has also been suggested that, when being scouted by A. C. Milan, the Watford player they were impressed with was in fact John Barnes and they mistakenly bid for Blissett being one of the two black strikers at the club. If this is the case, the group may have taken the name as a reference to a red herring.

Since the beginning of the project, the real Blissett has been aware of the group taking his name. However, early reports differed widely in saying whether he liked the attention he received because of them.

Blissett dispelled all doubts on 30 June 2004, when he appeared on the British television sports show Fantasy Football League - Euro 2004, broadcast on ITV. During the whole show, Blissett intelligently joked and quipped about his own (alleged) involvement in the Luther Blissett Project. After host Frank Skinner read a line from the novel Q's prologue, "The coin of the kingdom of the mad dangles on my chest to remind me of the eternal oscillation of human fortunes", Blissett produced a copy of Luther Blissett's Italian book Totò, Peppino e la guerra psichica (Toto, Peppino and the psychic war) and quoted extensively from it, in the original Italian: "Chiunque può essere Luther Blissett, semplicemente adottando il nome Luther Blissett" (Anyone can be Luther Blissett simply by adopting the name Luther Blissett). At the end of the show, hosts and guests all said in unison: "I am Luther Blissett!" Two years later, highlights of this broadcast were posted on YouTube.

In December 1999, the Italian activists who had launched the Luther Blissett Project in 1994 decided to discontinue usage of the name by committing symbolic ritual suicide, or seppuku. After authoring the best-selling historic novel Q by Luther Blissett, five of them went on to found the writers' collective Wu Ming, Chinese for "anonymous", and has also been extended to the Wu Ming Foundation.

An art of the "actual" and the methodology of storytelling, mythmaking and politics . . .

Re:LODE Methods & Purposes

The methodology of this project Re:LODE Radio, originates in the LODE and Re:LODE art project, and the Re:LODE blog includes a page of links to a number of articles setting out the parameters of a methodology appropriate to an experimental material and conceptual artwork.

The relevance of the Luther Blissett Project (LBP) to Re:LODE Radio is in their methodology, as it was the ablility to utilize media and communication that shaped their strategies. According to Marco Deseriis, the main purpose of the LBP was to create "a folk hero of the information society" whereby knowledge workers and those working with the immaterial could organize and recognize themselves. So, rather than being understood simply as a media prankster and culture jammer, Luther Blissett became a positive mythic figure that was supposed to embody the very process of community and cross-media storytelling. Roberto Bui, one of the co-founders of the LBP and Wu Ming, explains the function of Luther Blissett and other radical folk heroes as mythmaking or mythopoesis:

Mythopoesis is the social process of constructing myths, by which we do not mean “false stories,” we mean stories that are told and shared, re-told and manipulated, by a vast and multifarious community, stories that may give shape to some kind of ritual, some sense of continuity between what we do and what other people did in the past. A tradition. In Latin the verb “tradere” simply meant “to hand down something,” it did not entail any narrow-mindedness, conservatism or forced respect for the past. Revolutions and radical movements have always found and told their own myths.

Another important element was the relationship of the Italian LBP to the Autonomist-Marxist theory of labor known as Italian Workerism. Drawing from the work of Italian Workerists, such as Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Maurizio Lazzarato and others, the activists of the LBP envisioned Blissett as the expression of the capacity of immaterial workers to produce forms of wealth that cannot be properly measured and attributed to an individual producer. The incalculability of these new forms of labor is articulated in the "Declaration of Rights of Luther Blissett", redacted by the Roman LBP in 1995. In this manifesto, the LBP claims that because in late capitalism any social activity can potentially generate value, the culture and media industries should guarantee a basic income to every citizen detached from individual productivity:

The industry of the integrated spectacle and immaterial command owes me money.

I will not come to terms with it until I will not have what is owed to me. For all the times I appeared on TV, films, and on the radio as a casual passersby or as an element of the landscape, and my image has not been compensated . . . for all the words or expressions of high communicative impact I have coined in peripheral cafes, squares, street corners, and social centers that became powerful advertising jingles, without seeing a dime; for all the times my name and my personal data have been put at work inside stats, to adjust the demand, refine marketing strategies, increase the productivity of firms to which I could not be more indifferent; for all the advertising I continuously make by wearing branded t-shirts, backpacks, socks, jackets, bathing suits, towels, without my body being remunerated as a commercial billboard; for all of this and much more, the industry of the integrated spectacle owes me money! I understand it may be difficult to calculate how much they owe me as an individual. But this is not necessary at all, because I am Luther Blissett, the multiple and the multiplex. And what the industry of the integrated spectacle owes me, it is owed to the many that I am, and is owed to me because I am many. From this viewpoint, we can agree on a generalized compensation. You will not have peace until I will not have the money! LOTS OF MONEY BECAUSE I AM MANY: CITIZEN INCOME FOR LUTHER

The story of 'Q' is the story of powers and the extinction of rebellion.

This book cover design for Luther Blissett's 'Q' contains a detail of the same work of art that was used for the cover of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium when it was revised and republished in 1970 by Paladin. The painting in question is the The Battle of Alexander at Issus (German: Alexanderschlacht) is a 1529 oil painting by the German artist Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538). It portrays the 333 BC Battle of Issus. The painting is widely regarded as Altdorfer's masterpiece, and is one of the most famous examples of the type of Renaissance landscape painting known as the world landscape.

Q. So, what's the connection?

A. The entire background to the plot for the story of 'Q'.

Norman Cohn's book on millenarian movements, where he identifies, and describes, what he terms their strong "anarcho syndicalist", or "anarcho communist", characteristics, makes this an apposite connection concerning revolutionary responses to power, and the consequences of rebellion. 

The plot . . .

'Q' begins with Luther's nailing of his 95 theses on the door of the cathedral church in Wittenberg. The narrative follows the journey of an Anabaptist radical across Europe in the first half of the 16th century, as he joins in various movements and uprisings that come as a result of the Protestant reformation. The book spans 30 years as he is pursued by 'Q', short for "Qoèlet" (a name that is synonomous with Ecclesiastes), a spy for the Roman Catholic Church and cardinal Giovanni Pietro Carafa. The main character, who changes his name many times during the story, fights in the German Peasants' War beside Thomas Müntzer. 

The German Peasants' War was a widespread popular revolt in some German-speaking areas in Central Europe from 1524 to 1525. It failed because of intense opposition from the aristocracy, who slaughtered up to 100,000 of the 300,000 poorly armed peasants and farmers. The survivors were fined and achieved few, if any, of their goals. Like the preceding Bundschuh movement and the Hussite Wars, the war consisted of a series of both economic and religious revolts in which peasants and farmers, often supported by Anabaptist clergy, took the lead. The German Peasants' War was Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising prior to the French Revolution of 1789. The fighting was at its height in the middle of 1525.

The war began with separate insurrections, beginning in the southwestern part of what is now Germany and Alsace, and spread in subsequent insurrections to the central and eastern areas of Germany and present-day Austria. After the uprising in Germany was suppressed, it flared briefly in several Swiss cantons.

In mounting their insurrection, peasants faced insurmountable obstacles. The democratic nature of their movement left them without a command structure and they lacked artillery and cavalry. Most of them had little, if any, military experience. Their opposition had experienced military leaders, well-equipped and disciplined armies, and ample funding.

The revolt incorporated some principles and rhetoric from the emerging Protestant Reformation, through which the peasants sought influence and freedom. Radical Reformers and Anabaptists, most famously Thomas Müntzer, instigated and supported the revolt. In contrast, Martin Luther and other Magisterial Reformers condemned it and clearly sided with the nobles. In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, Luther condemned the violence as the devil's work and called for the nobles to put down the rebels like mad dogs.

This movement, be it political or economic, has been the subject of many studies, although historians have interpreted the economic aspects of the German Peasants' War differently, and social and cultural historians continue to disagree on its causes and nature. The historical background goes back to the Bohemian reformation, mentioned by Rocker in his overview of precedent and influence and the emergence of alternative ways of social and political organisation relating to Anarchism, its theory and practice. 

The Bohemian Reformation was not an internally unified movement. but although it split into many groups, some characteristics were shared by all of them – communion under both kinds, distaste for the wealth and power of the church, emphasis on the Bible preached in a vernacular language and on an immediate relationship between man and God. The Bohemian Reformation included efforts to reform the church before Jan Hus, the Hussite movement (so named following the burning at the stake of the reformer Jan Hus by the Papal authorities in Bohemia), the Unity of the Brethren and Utraquists or Calixtines. 

One the key instigators of the murderous thieving hordes of peasants, and key protagonist in the drama of the German Peasants' War, was the aforesaid Thomas Müntzer, the German preacher and radical theologian of the early Reformation whose opposition to both Martin Luther and the Roman Catholic Church led to his open defiance of late-feudal authority in central Germany. Müntzer was foremost amongst those reformers who took issue with Luther's compromises with feudal authority.

Few other figures of the German Reformation raised as much controversy as Müntzer, a controversy that continues to this day. A complex and unusual character, he is now regarded as a significant personality in the early years of the German Reformation and the history of European revolutionaries. 

Almost all modern studies stress the necessity of understanding his revolutionary actions as a consequence of his theology: Müntzer believed that the end of the world was imminent and that it was the task of the true believers to aid God in ushering in a new era of history. 

In June 1519, Müntzer attended the disputation in Leipzig between the reformers of Wittenberg (Luther, Karlstadt, and Philip Melanchthon) and the Catholic Church hierarchy (represented by Johann Eck). This was one of the high points of the early Reformation. Müntzer did not go unnoticed by Luther, who recommended him to a temporary post in the town of Zwickau.

In May 1520, Müntzer was able to capitalize on the recommendation made by Luther a year earlier, and stood in as temporary replacement for a reformist/humanist preacher named Johann Sylvanus Egranus at St Mary's Church in the busy town of Zwickau, near the border with Bohemia. 

Zwickau was in the middle of the important iron- and silver-mining area of the Erzgebirge, and was also home to a significant number of artisan workers, primarily weavers. Money from the mining operations, and from the commercial boom which mining generated, led to an increasing division between rich and poor citizens, and a parallel consolidation of larger manufacturers over small-scale craftsmen. Social tensions ran high. It was a town which, although exceptional for the times, nurtured conditions which presaged the trajectory of many towns over the following two centuries.

At St Mary's, Müntzer carried on as he had started in Jüterbog. This brought him into conflict with the representatives of the established church. He still regarded himself as a follower of Luther, however, and as such he retained the support of the town council, so much so that the town council appointed Müntzer to a permanent post at St Katharine's Church.

St Katharine's was the church of the weavers. Even before the arrival of Lutheran doctrines, there was already in Zwickau a reform movement inspired by the Hussite Reformation of the 15th century, especially in its radical, apocalyptic Taborite flavour. Amongst the Zwickau weavers this movement was particularly strong.

Tábor

The Taborites were so named after the Bohemian city of Tábor, that became a centre of Radical Hussite theological and political activity during the Hussite Wars during the preceding 15th century. In the spring of 1420, a group of South Bohemian Hussites led by Petr Hromádka managed to seize the town of Sezimovo Ústí and the nearby Hradiště Castle. In this place they began to build the model Hussite town Hradiste Mount Tabor - shortened to Tábor - named after Mount Tabor in Galilee. Social and economic equality was promoted in the city and the Taborites addressed each other as brothers and sisters.

Anarcho-communism?

Hussites flocked to Tábor from all over the country. Economically supported by Tábor's control of local gold mines, the citizens joined local peasants to develop a communal society. Taborites announced the Millennium of Christ and declared there would be no more servants and masters, all property would be held in common and there would be no more taxation. They promised that people would return to a state of pristine innocence. Some historians have found parallels to modern nationalist revolutionary movements.

Murray Bookchin argues that this was an early example of anarcho-communism. American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. A pioneer in the environmental movement, Bookchin formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning, within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and environmental philosophy. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), The Ecology of Freedom (1982) and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). 

In the late 1990s he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical "lifestylism" of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called Communalism, which seeks to reconcile Marxist and anarchist thought. As a prominent anti-capitalist and advocate of social decentralisation along ecological and democratic lines, his ideas have influenced social movements since the 1960s, including the New Left, the anti-nuclear movement, the anti-globalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, and more recently, the democratic confederalism of Rojava. He was a central figure in the American green movement and the Burlington Greens.

'Q' & the first draft of human rights and civil liberties and the first constituent assembly in Europe

Returning to the plot of 'Q', the "many named" main character is involved in the peasants movement, during which time he takes part in negotiations which are eventually formalised as the Twelve Articles. The Twelve Articles were part of the peasants' demands of the Swabian League during the German Peasants' War of 1525. They are considered the first draft of human rights and civil liberties in continental Europe after the Roman Empire. The gatherings in the process of drafting them are considered to be the first constituent assembly on German soil. 

In February 1525 Müntzer returned to Mühlhausen and took over the pulpit at St Mary's Church; the town council neither gave, nor was asked for, permission to make this appointment; it would seem that a popular vote thrust Müntzer into the pulpit. Immediately, he became the centre of considerable activity. In early March, the citizens were called upon to elect an "Eternal Council" which was to replace the existing town council, but whose duties went far beyond the merely municipal. Surprisingly, Müntzer was not admitted to the new council, nor to its meetings. 

Rainbow to rainbow . . .

Possibly because of this, Müntzer then founded the "Eternal League of God" in late March  1524. This was an armed militia, designed not just as a defence league, but also as a God-fearing cadre for the coming apocalypse. It met under a huge white banner which had been painted with a rainbow and decorated with the words The Word of God will endure forever. In the surrounding countryside and neighbouring small towns, the events in Mühlhausen found a ready echo, for the peasantry and the urban poor had had news of the great uprising in southwest Germany, and many were ready to join in.

At the beginning of May 1525, the Mühlhausen troop marched around the countryside in north Thuringia, but failed to meet up with other troops, being content to loot and pillage locally.

Luther pitched in very firmly on the side of the princes; he made a tour of southern Saxony – Stolberg, Nordhausen, and the Mansfeld district – in an attempt to dissuade the rebels from action, although in some of these places he was roundly heckled. He followed this up with his pamphlet Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, calling for the ruthless suppression of the revolt. This had a title and a timing that could not have been more ill-considered since it was the German peasantry who at that time died in their thousands at the hands of the princely armies. Estimates put the figure at 70,000–75,000, possibly even as high as 100,000.

At length, on 11 May 1525, Müntzer and what remained of his troops arrived outside the town of Frankenhausen, meeting up with rebels there who had been asking for help for some time. No sooner had they set up camp on a hill than the princes’ army arrived, having already crushed the rebellion in southern Thuringia. On 15 May, battle was joined. It lasted only a few minutes, and left the streams of the hill running with blood. Six thousand rebels were killed, but only a few soldiers. Many more rebels were executed in the following days. Müntzer fled, but was captured as he hid in a house in Frankenhausen. His identity was revealed by a sack of papers and letters which he was clutching. On 27 May, after torture and confession, he was executed alongside the lay preacher Pfeiffer, outside the walls of Mühlhausen, their heads being displayed prominently for years to come as a warning to others.

The Münster rebellion - "Après moi, le déluge!" 

Following the defeat and execution of Müntzer the "many named" protagonist of 'Q' becomes a witness to, and participant in the battles taking place in Münster's siege, during the Münster rebellion, known in Germany as Täuferreich von Münster, "Anabaptist dominion of Münster", an attempt by radical Anabaptists to establish a communal sectarian government in the German city of Münster.

After the German Peasants' War (1524–1525), a forceful attempt to establish theocracy was made at Münster, in Westphalia (1532–1535). Here the group had gained considerable influence, through the adhesion of Bernhard Rothmann, the Lutheran pastor, and several prominent citizens; and the leaders, Jan Matthys, a baker from Haarlem, and Jan Bockelson, a tailor from Leiden. Bernhard Rothmann was a tireless and vitriolic opponent of Catholicism and a writer of pamphlets that were published by his ally and wealthy wool merchant Bernhard Knipperdolling. The pamphlets at first denounced Catholicism from a radical Lutheran perspective, but soon started to proclaim that the Bible called for: 

the absolute equality of man in all matters including the distribution of wealth.

The pamphlets, which were distributed throughout northern Germany, successfully called upon the poor of the region to join the citizens of Münster to share the wealth of the town and benefit spiritually from being the elect of Heaven.

With so many adherents in the town, at the elections for the magistracy, Rothmann and his allies had little difficulty in obtaining possession of the town, and placing Bernhard Knipperdolling as the mayor after deposing the mainly Lutheran magistrates, who, until then, had seen him as an ally in their own distrust of, and dislike for, Catholics. 

Matthys was a follower of Melchior Hoffman, who, after his imprisonment at Strasbourg, obtained a considerable following in the Low Countries, including Bockelson, who became known as John of Leiden. John of Leiden and Gerrit Boekbinder had visited Münster, and returned with a report that Bernhard Rothmann was there teaching doctrines similar to their own. 

Matthys identified Münster as the "New Jerusalem", and on January 5, 1534, a number of his disciples entered the city and introduced adult baptism. Rothmann apparently accepted "rebaptism" that day, and well over 1000 adults were soon baptised. Vigorous preparations were made, not only to hold what had been gained, but to spread their beliefs to other areas. The many Lutherans who left the city were outnumbered by the arriving Anabaptists, who then embarked on an orgy of iconoclasm in cathedrals and monasteries. Rebaptism became compulsory. 

The property of the emigrants was shared out with the poor and soon a proclamation was issued that all property was to be held in common.

The city was then besieged by Franz von Waldeck, its expelled bishop. In April 1534 on Easter Sunday, Matthys, who had prophesied God's judgment to come on the wicked on that day, made a sally forth with only twelve followers, believing that he was a second Gideon, and was cut off with his entire band. 

He was killed, his head severed and placed on a pole for all in the city to see, and his genitals nailed to the city gate.

The 25-year-old John of Leiden was subsequently recognized as Matthys' religious and political successor, justifying his authority and actions by the receipt of visions from heaven. His authority grew, eventually proclaiming himself to be the successor of David and adopting royal regalia, honors and absolute power in the new "Zion". There were at least three times as many women of marriageable age as men now in the town and he made polygamy compulsory and himself took sixteen wives. 

John is said to have beheaded Elisabeth Wandscherer in the marketplace for refusing to marry him; this act might have been falsely attributed to him after his death.

Jan van Leiden baptizes a woman in Münster in a painting by Johann Karl Ulrich Bähr.

Meanwhile, most of the residents of Münster were starving as a result of the year-long siege. After lengthy resistance, the city was taken by the besiegers on June 24, 1535 and John of Leiden and several other prominent Anabaptist leaders were captured and imprisoned.

In January 1536 John of Leiden, Bernhard Knipperdolling and one more prominent follower, Bernhard Krechting, were tortured and executed in the marketplace of Münster. Their bodies were exhibited in cages, which hung from the steeple of St. Lambert's Church. The bones were removed later, but the cages hang there still.

The Münster Rebellion was a turning point for the Anabaptist movement. It never again had the opportunity of assuming political importance, as both Catholic and Lutheran civil powers adopted stringent measures to counter this.

The extinction of rebellion

Read from a political point of view, the novel 'Q' is an allegory of European society after the decline of the 1960s and 1970s protest movements. As in the 16th century, the Counter-Reformation repressed any alternative theological current or radical social movement, and the Peace of Augsburg sanctioned the partition of the continent among Catholic and Protestant powers. This echoes with the last twenty years of the 20th century;

marked by a vengeful rebirth of conservative ideologies, and the International Monetary Fund-driven corporate globalization of the economy seemed to rout any resistance.

Sarah Dunant admires Luther Blisset's epic team effort of revolution and Reformation, 'Q', writing her book review (Sat 31 May 2003) under the headline:

The early Marxists 

Q opens with a young theological student studying in Wittenberg two years after Luther's denunciation. "Along the walls of the university curiosity grows like ivy; young minds craving new topics to test their milk teeth on." The first 300 pages chart the most turbulent and violent years of the Reformation, the radicalism inside cities like Frankenhausen, Munster and Mulhausen unfolding as a catalogue of bloody encounters, with ever wilder prophets leading peasant uprisings against ever more brutal suppression from German princes (who are often in league with Lutherans, by now equally intolerant of their more radical bedfellows).

Told through the increasingly war-weary voice of the student, an Anabaptist turned mercenary, the novel leaps between towns, dates and battles. The air is full of blistering debate, revolutionary preaching and the smell of smoke, both from burning icons in the churches and the pyres on which the heretics are burned. This is the world of Dürer with elements of Bosch thrown in, and though it is occasionally confusing and repetitive, the very chaos and crude violence of it mirror the madness and apocalyptic vision that must have propelled so many to their doom.

Throughout this sprawling epic are scattered letters from the eponymous anti-hero, Q, a spy reporting to his Catholic cardinal master on his attempts to infiltrate and betray the Anabaptists from within. Gradually a wider political conspiracy reveals itself, one in which the heretics are pawns in a chess game of power played out between the Papacy, the German princes and the Holy Roman empire. If the heretics are early Marxists, their real enemy is burgeoning capitalism: church and state hand in hand with commerce and banking, intent on enforcing authority and stability in the face of the call for radical reform.

 Nemesis

Nemesis, an engraving by Albrecht Dürer.

Re:LODE Radio considers that it is worth expanding stereotypical notions of the foundation narratives of radical, progressive and leftwing politics, hence this very roundabout set of historical and contemporary excursions. The "world of Dürer with elements of Bosch", conjures for Re:LODE Radio a different kind of image from master Dürer, Nemesis.

The word nemesis originally meant the distributor of fortune, neither good nor bad, simply in due proportion to each according to what was deserved. Later, Nemesis came to suggest the resentment caused by any disturbance of this right proportion, the sense of justice that could not allow it to pass unpunished. In the Greek tragedies Nemesis appears chiefly as the avenger of crime and the punisher of hubris. 

The backstory to 'Q' consists of these historical dramas, but the reality, or realities is the stuff of everyday life, and people acting individually and together, according to things, ideas, necessities that are shared. Out of the situation of human communication there comes a purpose, or purposes. Communications have a purpose, and that includes the phatic communication, as well as, and as part of the process on message making and message interpretation. More like "the world of Brueghel" than the "world of Dürer with elements of Bosch".

The Dürer winged Nemesis stands on an orb, seemingly hovering over a world, a landscape, that appears peculiarly empty of human souls.

. . . a post pandemic world?

For the "world of Brueghel", and by extension, something akin to "our world", Re:LODE Radio chooses a picture that Brueghel painted towards the end of his life, perhaps his last large scale painting, The Magpie on the Gallows, in German: Die Elster auf dem Galgen, painted in 1568.

This is a picture of an inhabited world with a central, and foregounded image of gallows, a place of execution. The administration of death as a punishment at the hands of a worldly authority, enforcing "heavenly", or "hellish", doctrine.

Brueghel's painting was created the year after Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba, arrived in the Netherlands, sent by the Spanish king, Philip II to suppress the Dutch Revolt.

Nevertheless the people play music, gather in the fruits of their labours, and dance, not a dance of death, but a dance of merriment under the shadow of the gallows. The gallows may represent the threat of execution of those preaching the new Protestant doctrine, and the painting may allude to several Netherlandish proverbs.

There is a direct allusion to the Netherlandish proverbs of dancing on the gallows or shitting on the gallows, meaning a mocking of the state. It also alludes to the belief that magpies are gossips, prompted by their chattering calls, and that gossip leads to hangings. And that the way to the gallows leads through pleasant meadows.

In the far distance we see a seaport, and this is the "outward looking" aspect of the work, an aspect to which all are drawn when scanning Brueghel's art, moving towards an horizon and what was becoming a world of global trade and exchange.

It is not known why or for whom the picture was painted. Its date of 1568 makes this painting one of Bruegel's last works before his death in 1569; indeed, perhaps his final work. Brueghel asked his wife to burn some of his pictures on his death, but told her to keep the Magpie on the Gallows for herself.

Spanish gallows . . .

The Procession to Calvary of 1564 is Pieter Brueghel's radical version of Christ carrying the Cross, set in a large landscape, and that places the drama in a completely contemporary setting, making possible an interpretive link between the Roman authority that executed Christ at Calvary, and the punishment of Protestants by a militantly Catholic Spanish Empire.

This is the second-largest known painting by Brueghel. It is one of sixteen paintings by him which are listed in the inventory of the wealthy Antwerp collector, Niclaes Jonghelinck, drawn up in 1566.

The Mill and the Cross ( Młyn i krzyż) is a 2011 film directed by Lech Majewski, starring Rutger Hauer, Charlotte Rampling and Michael York, and is inspired by Brueghel's 1564 painting, and based on Michael Francis Gibson's book The Mill and the Cross.

The film focuses on a dozen of the 500 characters depicted in Bruegel's painting. It consists of a series of vignettes depicting everyday peasant life, interspersed with monologues from some of the principal characters, including Brueghel explaining the structure and symbolism of his painting. The theme of Christ's suffering is set against religious persecution in Flanders in 1564.

Spanish galleons . . .

Three years before the painting of this picture, in 1565, on the other side of the world, a Spanish Galleon sailing under the Spanish navigators Alonso de Arellano and Andrés de Urdaneta discovered an eastward return route across the Pacific. Reasoning that the trade winds of the Pacific might move in a gyre as the Atlantic winds did, they had to sail north to the 38th parallel north, off the east coast of Japan, before catching the eastward-blowing winds ("westerlies") that would take them back across the Pacific.

This was the beginning of a trade route that became known as the  Manila Galleons (Spanish: Galeón de Manila) that were instrumental in making global trade a reality. These were the Spanish trading ships which for two and a half centuries linked the Philippines with Mexico across the Pacific Ocean, making one or two round-trip voyages per year between the ports of Acapulco and Manila, which were both part of New Spain. The name of the galleon changed to reflect the city that the ship sailed from, and the term Manila Galleons is also used to refer to the trade route itself between Acapulco and Manila, which lasted from 1565 to 1815.

Brueghel knew about ships and shipping. He knew also about the brutalising oppression of a foreign power, Spain, to suppress belief and everything necessary to maintain its existence. But the real enemy, on the horizon, was a new world shaped by the  globalized capitalism. 

Two years after Brueghel's death in 1569 the Spanish founded the city of Manila. This event turned out to be: 

the beginning of globalized capitalism

And, "to remember this is to insist that, although Europe features in it, capitalism's story isn't a Eurocentric one".

XR activists at symbolic Gallows. Munich, Germany 20 September 2019

And the Anabaptist radicals were perhaps less like "Marxists before the word", and more like Extinction Rebellion but without the internet, social media platforms and the electric information environment:

Extinction Rebellion

Large Bike Lane Stencil | Extinction Rebellion

Extinction Rebellion is a loosely networked, decentralised, grassroots movement. Anyone who takes action in pursuit of "XR's three goals and adheres to its ten principles, which includes non-violence, can claim to do it in the name of XR."

The Economist identified the group as using the tenets of holacracy to operate more effectively given strong state opposition.

Holacracy

The Holacracy system was developed at Ternary Software, an Exton, Pennsylvania company that was noted for experimenting with more democratic forms of organizational governance. Ternary founder Brian Robertson distilled the company's best practices into an organizational system that became known as Holacracy in 2007.

Holacracy Constitution

Robertson later developed the "Holacracy Constitution", which lays out the core principles and practices of the system. In June 2015, he released the book Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World, that details and explains his practices.

The term holacracy is derived from the term holarchy, coined by Arthur Koestler in his 1967 book The Ghost in the Machine. A holarchy is composed of holons (Greek: ὅλον, holon neuter form of ὅλος, holos "whole") or units that are autonomous and self-reliant, but also dependent on the greater whole of which they are part. Thus a holarchy is a hierarchy of self-regulating holons that function both as autonomous wholes and as dependent parts.

Organisation and roles

Extinction Rebellion has a decentralised structure. Providing that they respect the 'principles and values', every local group can organise events and actions independently. To organise the movement, local groups are structured with various 'working groups' taking care of strategy, outreach, well-being, etc.

XR Youth

A youth wing—XR Youth—of Extinction Rebellion had formed by July 2019. In contrast to the main XR, it is centred around consideration of the Global South and indigenous peoples, and more concerned with climate justice. By October 2019 there were 55 XR Youth groups in the UK and another 25 elsewhere. All XR Youth comprise people born after 1990, with an average age of 16, and some aged 10.

Extinction Rebellion was established in the United Kingdom in May 2018 with about one hundred academics signing a call to action in support in October 2018, and launched at the end of October by Roger Hallam, Gail Bradbrook, Simon Bramwell, and other activists from the campaign group Rising Up!.

Grassroots movements such as those of Occupy, Gandhi's Satyagraha, the suffragettes, Gene Sharp, Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement have been cited as sources of inspiration In seeking to rally support worldwide around a common sense of urgency to tackle climate breakdown, reference is also made to Saul Alinsky. His Rules for Radicals (1972), is seen as offering insights as to "how we mobilise to cope with emergency", and "strike a balance between disruption and creativity". Roger Hallam has been clear that the strategy of public disruption is "heavily influenced" by the community-organizing tactician: "The essential element here is disruption. Without disruption, no one is going to give you their eyeballs”.

A number of activists in the movement accept arrest and imprisonment, similar to the mass arrest tactics of the Committee of 100 in 1961.

Bertrand Russell & his wife Edith Russell lead anti-nuclear march by the Committee of 100 in London on Sat 18 Feb 1961 along with Michael Randle (2nd left), Rev Michael Scott (next right), Ralph Schoenman (next to Edith Russell), Ian Dixon (holding banner, right) and Terry Chandler (far right). A rally in Trafalgar Square was followed by peaceful sit-down Committee of 100 protest at the Defence Ministry against Polaris missiles being delivered to River Clyde.

Action for life . . .

So the banner runs in 1961, and so the banners run in the Extinction Rebellion protests. The coronacrisis has exposed the truth that those in power are accountable, but only if different populations choose to act to hold politicians and capitalists accountable in significant numbers. The enemyin this context is apathy, especially when the "bad guys" are well organised and better resourced.