pinkfloydpsw's Blog

The problem in the west can be reduced to batman, bear with me…Batman is no hero, he’s a privileged-by-birth man of vast inherited wealth who grants to himself the dictatorial right to define moral justice within a society where, the lawful, but not moral, actions of his class have caused, with impunity, a historical mass hoarding of the value of all the world’s natural resources, along with the exploitation of all the world’s manual and intellectual labour.

As Bruce Wayne he is the root cause of the problems of poverty and inequality that lead inevitably to the social maladies that as Batman he pretends solving is not just an act of self gratification and glorification. I think I’m right to assume that people treated fairly in the exchange of their efforts with a reward that allows them to live with dignity and without envy of others that do much less and get much more for, are not prone to upsetting the order of society and not interested much in overcoming a reasonable level of inequality. Inequality is inevitable, some are more innovative, some do things that matter more, some are more skilled, some work harder, some faster, some are unequal in a natural way like the speed they can run or the height they happen to be, it would be ridiculous not to recognise that basketball players happen to be tall for instance. Unnatural Inequality breeds social upheaval, Bentham spotted this and should maybe have his own comic, TV series, film series, where he goes round reforming the lot of the poor by making the rich realise that the acts of criminality that are foisted on them may well be as a result of their own gluttony, he could wear a superhero suit too?

Batman/Wayne circumvents the failing judicial system and acts as a vigilante that appears to be doing moral work in clearing crime, but that judicial system is most often if not always, the result of conversations and meetings of the class Wayne belongs to (in any epoch the ruling laws are the laws of the ruling classes?), and historically the actions of his predecessors in their privileged positions. Crime is very often forced upon the criminal as the only option to survive in many cases where other options diminish or vanish (austerity), and crime is demonstrably result of inequality more so than because of evil notions in the mind of those born to be bad. I mean who’s really born with bad intentions, I’ll concede that they can be accumulated yes, or even nurtured and assimilated from circumstances and people in them, but born? It goes like this…whatever you can do you can justify as the correct thing to do, that applies to privilege as well as crime, as a necessity to being able to do it.

Batman/Wayne has no more idea that his actions may be the wrong thing to do than Johnson has that his words need be truthful (2022 uk politics), in fact Johnson cannot comprehend that he may have done something wrong because his Dunning-Kruger brain somehow just won’t allow it. I liken this to parking like an asshole outside the shop on the road and in every other drivers way when there’s a carpark you could have used, but hey it’s me and although I agree that this is not a good spot, it’s me and I’ll only be a minute. We tend to do to others the very things that would annoy the hell out of us, but come on it’s me…

Nobody asks why the guy batman has just killed was engaged in the act, maybe he had mouths to feed, maybe he got laid off from a factory that Wayne mothballed, maybe he couldn’t make the rent Wayne’s property management executive had just put up for the sake of growth and investment? Batman/Wayne could make a big difference, or even end poverty in his city, by having a little less personally accumulated materials that he will not and cannot in a lifetime possibly utilise, and giving the members of society that create that enormous surplus more of the benefits of their labour.

What I’m saying is that if value is created by humans doing labour, intellectual or physical, and that value can be called an economy, then the question has to be why do those persons who do the most of this labour get the least from it? We call this process voluntary exchange, where a person sells the value of 8 hours / 5 days / 46 weeks / 50 years or so to a party/parties that accumulate value by that labour, then pays the employee a reasonable amount back for it. This process assumes that the seller of the labour has negotiating rights in the exchange, and that requires collective action to oppose the owners of capital (those that invest in business ventures) so that they do not exploit, which would be their goal. We call this body a government (the representative will of the mass of a populous within a nominal democracy), and the reason is that governments form or modify laws that protect majorities, but is that the case?

I would argue that more often a government is a collective of persons that are drawn mainly from the capitalist class (those that have excess value to invest in employment so as to create for themselves greater excess value), not a body that represents or is filled with people who actually do labour. The class they represent, an aristocracy of capital, is demonstrably never benevolent, but merely aware of what that populous will put up with as of now, and ever effectively working psychologically toward expanding that threshold by using fear in media to press further an ideology that makes workers call louder and ever louder for restrictions of their own liberties.

The destruction of unions (collective bargaining) was not achieved by force, it was achieved by convincing the people that the unions, rather than the faceless exploitative owners of large businesses, were the problem, and that productivity and harder work for falling remuneration was the solution to saving an economy overburdened with value takers (benefit claimants). The truth is that for any economy to work then as prices rise wages must rise to meet them, else people pull back from spending and demand falls. The reason for this is that it is no good having a consumer based economy without a body of persons who can demand goods and have a disposable income to buy them.

Now capitalism has within it various mechanisms to stall this problem

1. Extend credit – where today’s purchase is premised on tomorrows wage. This requires that for the lender the extension of the loan is worthwhile as they get to sell goods now, and for the debtor they can have the good now and the value of the money borrowed decreases as they increase their wage over time and because of inflation of course; borrow £100 now and in 10 years £100 is not worth what it is now, goods will increase in price so saving to buy is a lesser option than borrowing to buy, plus it increases the velocity of the economy and drives supply incentive.
2. Pursue revenue where it was not present before – start to charge money for things that were already paid for, like prescriptions, garden waste bins, hospital car parks etc, this is basic theft though because there things were already paid for through taxation, and you don’t get a rebate when they aren’t.
3. Sell national assets to private capital – creating value where governments could not charge money for things already owned, but can pay much larger fees to private landlords to rent houses that they used to own, while pretending that freedom is security of tenure though ownership for the non buy-to-rent buyer but in truth preventing social upheaval by mortgage enslavement.
4. Ramp up productivity – same value less labour, therefore a saving. The problem being that when all productivity is ramped up then more output is created than can be absorbed by a populous that has no more means than before, this is often referred to as the crisis of capitalism.
5. Shadow Work – get people doing for free what used to be part of the service paid for, like reading their own meter, self checkout, self check in, online banking, putting fuel in their own vehicle etc. The only beneficiary of this is the business that provides the service, or doesn’t anymore. It is important to remember that I don’t work in the supermarket!
6. Austerity – the dramatic loss of services paid for by taxation so that banks can be given public money to lend to people. This is just a massive theft really, and ultimately pointless as the failing banking sector would have changed to survive and the people would have ultimately tamed capital for a while.
7. Force down interest rates – to encourage people not to save as there is no point in storing value, this one does stimulate spending but ruins investment.
8. Use any opportunity to misappropriate public funds into the hands of those close to the rulers – see pandemic spending 2020-2022
9. Increase the taxes that affect only the working class – VAT is a poor persons tax, it affects consumable goods and is paid by all persons regardless of income unless they are in a position to not pay it or circumnavigate it (like rich folks often do). Better is to tax income in the country where that income is generated and reduce VAT because the consumption of let’s say milk is the same for Mr Sunak as it is for average Joe, but average Joe cannot purchase Art, employ staff, buy work based necessities etc to offset income tax as he/she will be PAYE (taxed before payment, not after like the rich).
10. War – The ultimate way to absorb economic output on behalf of a populous, where said populous will go on to put up with any economic circumstance to support their troops in their moral and patriotic duty to rid the world of some other people that they don’t understand and had likely never heard of beforehand. This also provides a wonderful distraction away from whatever failures the gov of the day was embroiled in before it kicked off.

But anyway, back to the bat, and the question of how it comes to be that Wayne’s class is ruling, when the majority of persons of course occupy the working and middle classes. How does it arise that the majority of persons vote against their best interests? The answer is simple, the Capitalists are in control of the messages that make the minds of the populous, their control of the press is almost ubiquitous, and their oppression of dissenting voices is written into the laws of the land, and increasing with rapidity. Without an objective and independent media there can be no real democracy of the people, protecting their rights to their own labour as if it is theirs to sell, and without laws that protect freedom of speech and the ability to collectivise and to protest (often now protest gains the same opprobrium, and the same measures to curb it, as terrorism) the people cannot share their doubts, organise, and express their ire.

Wayne is the Media, the Government, the Law, the Educations system, and quite ridiculously he has the people on his side, and more importantly off his case; very much NOT critically analysing his actions. The public have been conditioned by every facet of their society and upbringing to believe that it is necessary to work to get by, that they have no natural rights (and of course they don’t under these circumstances in law where all is property other than the air, and all is already owned and has been handed down repeatedly, since being handed over by Kings long ago) to a stake of the land they are born in. Most people, even intellectuals, even students of history, fail to link poverty with capitalism, and social upheaval with criminality, and do not link the lack of natural property rights to class conflict. These mechanisms within society even change the way we speak to each other about such things, we often hear people talking in bars and shops in ways where they express their place in society in terms of what they happen to be doing for a living, we see it in game shows “hi I’m Peter and I’m a retired teacher from Kent” as if even in retirement (where you are clearly not the thing you once were Peter) he tries to create in the minds of the viewer the idea that his validity as an object in society is measurable against theirs in a meaningful way because he sold his time and his energies to a body greater than himself for likely a remuneration that wasn’t worth it ultimately.

And you may notice in the narrative it is often the idea that the police force has not the resources to cope with the problem, how did that situation arise if not by the acts of those that shape the fabric of society by economic means? Wayne’s class deliberately defunds that which stand in its path, then supports interventions that alleviate their responsibilities, but stand proud to act as the figureheads of those interventions (I mean charities), and have the stones to appear in magazines and on chat shows discussing the possible solutions to social problems. Often their solution points directly away from themselves, it is to be found in a change of law where harsher punishments will deter the poor from taking from the rich. To me the hero of the Dickens’s classic Oliver is Fagan, his intervention is not evil it is an alternative economy, a protest against that which enslaves him and his ilk. Wayne is the opposite of Fagan, his playground is elitism, there is no downside to his action for if he was caught doing what he does he would be cleared of any charges and spun as a force for good as he will be judged by his peers not ours..

Paul S Wilson