Monthly Archives: April 2021

And so the Tuchel revolution roars on. In a manner of speaking. The second-best thing anyone could say about the second leg of Chelseas 2-1 aggregate defeat of Porto in Seville was that it was, on balance, an act of cardiovascular exercise. Everyone involved burned some calories.

The best thing arguably the only thing is that Chelsea cruised through without a scratch and will now take their place in the semi-finals of the Champions League, setting up a mouthwatering denouement to their own peculiar season of two halves.

This game was decided by a stupendous overhead kick from Mehdi Taremi in the last minute of injury time, Portos second shot on target, but it felt more like a punchline than a winning goal.

Often occasions like these are described as forgettable. This one didnt get that far. In order to be forgotten, a thing must exist in some material form in the first place. Instead this was a conspiracy of nihilism, Chelsea happy to oversee 90 minutes of nothing, Porto struggling fruitlessly to escape their own part in it. Not that Thomas Tuchel will lose a microsecond contemplating any of this. The best way to win a quarter-final is to do it without breaking sweat. In which case: job done.

And from here Chelsea are quite capable of winning the Champions League, of overcoming two more opponents from Real Madrid or Liverpool, followed by either Manchester City, Borussia Dortmund or Paris Saint-Germain, all teams that Tuchel will view with informed interest and absolutely no fear.

Tuchel is often cast as a technocrat and a systems man, but there is a strong seam of pragmatism too. He doesnt want to play three at the back and edge forward behind his tortoise defence, shields locked together, because he thinks its more fun or more pure that way. He does it because in his opinion its the best way to win right now.

And so it proved to be over two games in Seville, despite some utterly misleading zest from Porto in the opening minutes. Srgio Conceio has clearly been studying Sam Allardyce videos. Here Porto pressed high and hard early on, eager to disrupt the deep, metronomic heart of this Chelsea team.

It soon become clear there was something strange about what Porto were trying to do. The white shirts were a trippy mix of pressing like maniacs followed by slow dithery possession when they got the ball. This was like watching the world sprint-knitting championships, or a particularly angry attempt to tickle someone to death. At one point early on three players pressed NGolo Kant, took the ball, then passed it backwards.

It was that kind of game. Porto attacked constantly without really ever attacking. Their total first-half offsides equalled zero, as did their total first-half shots on goal. This was like watching someone trying very hard to give an impression of wanting to win.

They did it again at the start of the second half, pressing high but with no real object in mind, passing sideways with an angry air of urgency.

There was still tension. Would someone have a shot, just to see what it felt like? Would Porto accidentally discover the physical plane known as forwards and instantly lose their minds at the scale of such a find, like the first Russian cosmonauts looking down and seeing the world an unfenced blue ball?

Steadily the game became an endless stream of shirt-tugging fouls, which is certainly one way of passing an entire half-hour of your own finite mortal existence.

If this game was a formality from about the five-minute mark, it was still significant in three things. It told us once again about Chelseas game management, their ability to oversee this lack of content.

It also flagged up the one obvious area in this team that still lags: the precise makeup of the attack. Tuchel went with the Havertz-Mount-Pulisic trident, one to run, one to pass and press, one to drift around like a dreamy-looking Jane Austen hero with talent to burn, a player so agreeably effete at moments you half-expect to look down and notice hes wearing a ruffled blue shirt and a pair of britches.

But Chelsea struggled to counterattack. They struggled to hold the ball in forward positions and move up the pitch. Tuchel will perhaps look again at the effectiveness of this system against teams that can dominate possession for long spells.

The third thing was simply to emphasise once again what a time this is to be a Chelsea fan, player, or manager. The fixture list from here is stupendously good: Champions League and FA Cup semi-finals, three deliciouslooking London derbies, and a late-breaking top-four shootout with Leicester.

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And Chelsea really do have very little to lose from here. This feels like fresh snow, an unspoilt peak, and a degree of overachievement already. It shouldnt feel like that given the money spent. But somehow Tuchel, an elite manager, and Chelsea, with their wealth of playing riches have the air of a sporty, unencumbered, underdog. Both have a free hit in this competition from here. They may not get a better shot at it.

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Conspiracy of nihilism suits Chelsea and pragmatic Thomas Tuchel - The Guardian

NewsOpinionColumnistsYoungsters rioting in Northern Ireland werent born when the Good Friday Agreement was signed, let alone lived through the Troubles.

Thursday, 15th April 2021, 7:00 am

But now theyre on the streets throwing stones and bottles, burning buses and confronting the police.

Some of it, no doubt, whipped up by insidious paramilitary forces able to wind them up and tool them up. But its as much just anger at the hopelessness of their situation.

Their political leaders have failed and its not rioting for a purpose, nor even against anything in reality. Instead, its just a rage. Its nihilism with nothing to be gained, just destroying whatever they can.

I feel sorry for them in many ways though nothing can condone their behaviour with the risks to life and the futile damage of property. Northern Irelands economy is a mess and that was before coronavirus. For many of these young people, itll be a life on benefits and already theyre marked out as failures in the education system, if theyre even still attending school.

But even the province they were born in and believed was their country is threatened. They dont feel secure in their land, let alone having a future in it. The political leaders of the unionist tribe have been sold out by the British state they claimed to venerate, Boris Johnson flat out lying about no border in the Irish Sea. Even the DUP are now left with little idea about what to do.

A united Ireland draws closer. But Germanys still trying to resolve issues brought about by unification. At least there it was something welcomed by all other than a few Communist die-hards.

A 32-county state burns deep in the soul of many in Ireland but theres still a significant Protestant minority that will forever begrudge it.

Would the Republic even want the financial basket case thats the six counties and could they cope with it? Theres challenged areas in the 26 counties already, such as Limerick. Would they welcome limited resources being pushed north?

Its economic as much as constitutional and these kids need a future whether in Britain or Ireland.

Kenny MacAskill is the Alba Party MP for East Lothian

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Northern Ireland's riots are born of nihilism, despair and Boris Johnson's lies about the Irish Sea border Kenny MacAskill MP - The Scotsman

Jonathan Taplin may not be a household name, but he has been behind the scenes of some of the most influential moments in 20th century American music. As the description of Taplins latest book notes, the University of Southern California professor emeritus has made waves in every one of the past several decades: he was tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band in the '60s, producer of major films in the '70s, an executive at Merrill Lynch in the '80s, creator of the Internet's first video-on-demand service in the '90s, and a cultural critic and author writing about technology in the new millennium. Taplin joins Robert Scheer on this weeks installment of Scheer Intelligence to discuss his fascinating career as well as his friendships and encounters with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Martin Scorsese, Eric Clapton, and many others, all of which is captured in his new memoir, The Magic Years: Scenes From a Rock-and-Roll Life.

In a wide-ranging conversation, Scheer and Taplin share personal stories about the 60s and 70s and break down how money corrupted the revolutionary music that emerged from that era. They specifically note the case of Bob Dylan, who started his career when music was not a lucrative industry and he and his music--partly inspired by the countercultural ideas the Beats had begun to explore before him--played a significant role in the political movements of his time.

We have to worry about who [are] going to be the leaders of the culture, says Taplin. If I can think about the role that Sam Cooke or Bob Dylan played in the early sixties in terms of thinking about supporting the Civil Rights Movement, or even the amount of money that Louis Armstrong gave to Martin Luther King, which was a lot, and then I'd look to what happened this last fall--quite honestly, I was more impressed with what LeBron James was doing in terms of trying to get people to vote and forcing the NBA to open up all its stadiums so that people could vote in those stadiums, than I was with what, you know, Kanye West or Jay-Z was doing.

Musicians are more thinking about selling their champagne company to Louis Vuitton than they are thinking about getting people to vote. So maybe now the sports stars are more the cultural heroes than the rock stars. That's a kind of strange change and I don't really know why that is.

The Magic Years author also warns against the nihilism that many cultural figures have fallen prey to in recent decades. In response, Scheer, who also played an active role in the activist movements of the 60s, points to what he sees as the main culprit behind what Taplin labels nihilism.

It seems that the ability of the [capitalist] system [is to get us] all to [sell out], Scheer posits, This is something that comes up in these podcasts all the time: don't sell out, don't sell out, don't sell out. Suddenly--and Bob Dylan played a role in this--selling out became fashionable. And to resist selling out, that became being kind of out of it.

Taplin, who joined Scheer previously on the show to discuss his book Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, also outlines how the arguments of his previous book were illustrated vividly by the attacks on the Capitol on January 6. Listen to the latest conversation between Taplin and Scheer as they also discuss the intersectionality of class and race in American society, as well as examine how the revolving door between Wall Street and D.C. has helped establish and promote a type of capitalism that is destroying main street while making the 1 percent richer than anyone thought imaginable.

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Capitalism Killed the Rock-and-Roll Star | Scheer Intelligence - KCRW

Bonanno, whom Higgins was already dating, was brought on board as the only member of the creative team with previous script-writing experiencehes a member of Aunty Donna, a sketch troupe with their own Netflix show. Even then, the three creators werent entirely sure how to write a sitcom. Bonanno used Seinfelds The Big Salad episode as a model, studying its script to figure out how to structure an A-plot and a B-plot. Higgins drew from her extensive experience watching TV as a child in Bullengarook, a rural town 30 miles from Melbourne. Mahbub had to threaten to quit her job in order to get leave to attend script workshops.

Though they didnt have much professional training, they did have plenty of material to draw from. Much of Why Are You Like This was inspired by the creative teams own experiences. Pennys arc in the premiere episode, in which she accuses a gay man of being homophobic, is based upon something Higgins did back when she worked at a tech startup. Another episode focuses on Austins depression, an illness all three creators have battled. The song that plays during Austins drag performance in that episode, Peggy Lees Is That All There Is?, is the same song one of Bonanno and Higginss friends listens to when hes depressed. They based the character on him and added the performance element after script editors said the episode needed something active, after several scenes in which Austin is not moving much, because, as Bonanno said, when youre depressed, you cant fucking do anything.

Internet-induced nihilism is an essential component of Why Are You Like This. According to Higgins, being a 20-something means seeing fucked stuff all the time [as a result] of being online. But because youre so depressed, its all fine. Its all gravy, baby. Still, its strange to see those aforementioned glowing reviews classifying the show as a grenade being launched at Gen Z. The characters are young, but their generation is never definednor do the creators think it necessarily matters. I think anyone writing about this over 35 are like, [Its about] young people, Mahbub said. Its not that the technologys any different, its just that [theyve] forgotten what its like to be 22. (For context, Mahbub is 31, Bonanno is 33, and Higgins is in her late 20s.)

To accurately depict their characters experiences, basically, we didnt have to do a focus group on how 20-year-olds use TikTok, Bonanno said. That said, hes personally reduced the amount of time he spends on social media these days. Mahbub deleted her Twitter a while ago, as shes told several interviewers while doing press for the show. Im prone to cyberbullying, she told memeaning that shes susceptible to bullying other people. (She does, however, still have a lurking account.) I guess its all on me, Higgins said. I feel pretty cemented in TikTok and those sorts of things. Im a huge consumer of that kind of media. [The show] is us looking back at our experiences when we were younger and a little angrier, but then, were writing about today, and were still alive today.

Its not like the creators have an optimistic outlook for the world anyway. Its been shit, Mahbub said. Itll be shit, and then theres nothing. Thats it. So why bother making a show? The answer is simple, said Higgins: What else are we doing?

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Blu-rayByTom Stockman|April 16, 2021

The Original DJANGO (1966) will be available on 4K Ultra HD with TEXAS ADIOS included on Blu-ray May 25th From Arrow Video

In this definitive spaghetti western, Franco Nero (Keoma,The Fifth Cord) gives a career-defining performance as Django, a mysterious loner who arrives at a mud-drenched ghost town on the Mexico-US border, ominously dragging a coffin behind him. After saving imperilled prostitute Maria (Loredana Nusciak), Django becomes embroiled in a brutal feud between a racist gang and a band of Mexican revolutionaries

WithDjango, director Sergio Corbucci (The Great Silence) upped the ante for sadism and sensationalism in westerns, depicting machine-gun massacres, mud-fighting prostitutes and savage mutilations. A huge hit with international audiences,Djangos brand of bleak nihilism would be repeatedly emulated in a raft of unofficial sequels.

The film is presented here in its 4K UHD Blu-ray debut, with a wealth of extras. Also included is the bonus featureTexas, Adioson Blu-ray, which also stars Franco Nero, and was released as a sequel toDjangoin some countries.

2-DISC 4K UHD BLU-RAY LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS

DISC 1 DJANGO [4K UHD BLU-RAY]

DISC 2 TEXAS ADIOS [BLU-RAY]

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The Original DJANGO and TEXAS ADIOS Available on 4K Ultra HD and Blu-ray May 25th From Arrow Video - We Are Movie Geeks

THE ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE LAST CHAPTER OFATTACK ON TITAN.

Attack on Titan just ended its 11-year manga run, and that story will be adapted for the finale of the anime series this Winter. In the climax, the heroes had to prevent the big bad from triggering an apocalypse that didn't just destroy the world but would rewrite Reality itself. This is actually a very common trope in a lot of manga and anime.

This trend began in the 1970s and has continued from time to time. It might have begun with Go Nagai's series Devilman, which evolved from a supernatural superhero story into a full-blown apocalypse with the hero fighting an ultimate battle with Satan himself, who's the big bad of the series. He lost, humanity is exterminated, and Satan, who actually loves him, is left alone with his bisected corpse on a devastated Earth. This was possibly the darkest and most nihilistic ending in the history of Comics. A new, faithful anime adaptation, called Devilman: Crybaby, is now on Netflix. Hajime Isayama draws on that series for his climax to Attack on Titan.

The trope became big again in the late 1990s in manga and anime when Hideaki Anno ended Neon Genesis Evangelion on an ambiguous note where the emotionally devastated and dysfunctional hero Shinji Ikari is the one with the choice to completely rewrite the universe and all of Time and Space. Since then, a huge number of epic manga and anime series have used that trope. So have Marvel and DC Comics, who practically do that every year in their crossover events. The difference is, when a villain in Western comics wants to take over the world or all of reality, it's usually because they're megalomaniacs and want power. They hardly ever talk about what they would use that power for. The power is usually just a McGuffin for the heroes to keep them from using. There's a deeper, more existential reason for the baddie wanting the power to change the world and reality itself in Japan. A Japanese big bad is usually a disillusioned idealist fallen into nihilism. He thinks the world sucks so much he wants to rewrite it into his idea of utopia. Eren Jaeger in Attack on Titan uses the power of the Founding Titan to threaten the world and sets himself up so that his love Mikasa can save the world by killing him, leaving only the new reality that there are no more Titans. It even referencesDevilmanin having a hero carry the decapitated head of their dead love.

The fantasy of changing reality seems to spring from a deep sense of helplessness in the state of the world. It's a fantasy about playing God. These manga villains don't want to talk over the world. They want to change it and mold it to their idea of a better world. It's villainous because it's the epitome of hubris, and the bad guy is willing to murder literally billions of people to succeed. It's also often remarkably convoluted and melodramatic. Manga editors are certainly encouraging creators to plot for this long arc in order to give a series a point to work towards and an ending to plan for. You can't have a more epic climax to a series than all of reality under threat. Attack on Titan is the latest example of this trend, and it certainly won't be the last.

And next winter, anime fans will get to watch the animated version of this climax.

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Attack on Titan's Apocalyptic Climax is Part of a Common Trend - Bleeding Cool News

Im from Knoxville, Tenn.

You probably havent thought much about the mid-sized Southern city I call home for the same reasons you dont often find yourself imaginatively drifting off in the middle of a busy work day with thoughts of your 5-year-old Honda lawnmower that always starts even if you forget to change the oil from year to year.

Our nations paper of record, the esteemed New York Times, once described my ancestral home as the couch, or a place too unassuming to shout about but too comfortable to leave.

For much of my life I mostly believed in Knoxvilles couch-like quality. That it was and is an easy place to live, raise children and own a home. However, when I returned to it some 10 years ago as an adult, the seams on the old couch Id called home for much of my life began to show.

This growing uneasiness with Knoxville only worsened upon my becoming a psychotherapist at my old high school, where I found that many students and families as well as several of my former classmates and coworkers had very different experiences with my town. With patience, kindness and a nearly inexhaustible grace, they let me in on a world where 26.5% of our residents live in poverty and where, when we account for age, this number jumps to 39% of our elementary-aged children and 34.8% of our adolescent population.

These figures only get worse if you are a Knoxvillian of color.

In 2017, our local paper, The Knoxville News Sentinel, reported that while Blacks and African Americans comprise only 17% of Knoxvilles population, 42% of them live in poverty, which far outpaces the Black poverty rates of Memphis, Chattanooga or Atlanta. Much of this 17% lives in a stretch of our community colloquially known as East Knoxville, which may have appeared in your Apple News Feed recently due to a spate of gun violence that has, since the beginning of 2021, tragically claimed the lives of five adolescents of color from just one high school in our city, Austin-East.

With patience, kindness and a nearly inexhaustible grace, they let me in on a world where 26.5% of our residents live in poverty.

Four friends from across the United States reached out to me in the wake of this weeks news cycle to ask if I was OK. Because I once worked at an inner city school, and because I live 3.6 miles from A-E, but Im not really nearby. My relative geographic proximity is due, in some ways, to Knoxvilles size (or lack thereof), and in others to the deep-seated and long-standing community segregation that has effectively cordoned off the inner city and its dangers from the rest of us.

Im saying I might as well live 36 miles away from whats been happening just over the ridge. In the gap between the 3.6 miles separating Austin-East from my home exists an insurmountable trench of income inequality, payday lenders, institutional abandonment, systemic, individual and carceral racism not to mention an almost ethereal fog that settles over most Knoxvillians like me anytime gun violence besieges urban neighborhoods.

When I say, like me, I most certainly mean well-meaning middle and upper-middle-class white people.

Cornel West once called this fog that thickens around us we paralyzed, white suburban onlookers a sort-of deadening nihilism that is characterized by psychic depression, personal worthlessness and social despair, where hope is eliminated by a market morality that undermines a sense of meaning and larger purpose.

The easy narratives of race, income and social class are but the outward manifestations of a rotted self-identity.

In a fuller treatment on the matter, West argues that the easy narratives of race, income and social class that so thoroughly separate us from one another are but the outward manifestations of a rotted self-identity rooted in a devotion to market-mandated self-interest and scarcity as nationwide moral imperatives. To be clear, West is saying that capitalism is the thing pitting us against one another even if we use questionable racial and sociological assumptions to support our ongoing segregation.

Ibram Kendi makes a similar claim in his masterwork on the history of American chattel slavery, Stamped, as he argues for an understanding of racism as less an ideology driving violence and oppression in America, and more a sociological explanation for what is, frankly, a naked, capitalistic self-interest that predates Eugenics and Jim Crow Southern nativism.

According to both West and Kendi, no matter how thoroughly we seek to sequester the effects of our crippling addiction to self-interest within oppressed and impoverished communities bereft of resources and support, nor the lengths to which we go to blame the oppressed for their plight, nihilistic self-interest eventually takes all of us in the end. But it seems as if its coming for our kids first.

Nihilistic self-interest eventually takes all of us in the end. But it seems as if its coming for our kids first.

This may explain why despite the ways in which the paths of affluent, Caucasian teenagers and those of impoverished teenagers of color in my city seem to exponentially diverge after birth there exists a convergence of these two groups in adolescence around the loss of meaning, purpose and eventually, life itself. In some of the most affluent schools and communities in my city, ones not recently featured on your Apple News feed, there continues to be an exponential rise in teenage suicide. Nationwide, according to the CDC, suicide is the second leading cause of death in all American children aged 10 to 24, and the number of American children taking their own lives has tripled since 2007.

Whether seeing more affluent teenagers in private practice as I do now, or less affluent ones at my old high school as I once did, I am reminded of something I learned early on in my work with kids across the sociological spectrum. Namely, that even amidst sometimes inappropriate, confusing or even violent behaviors, teenagers are the symptoms incarnate of a much larger institutional sickness. Instead of being the problem, they reveal it, in technicolor. Or, as one of my first supervisors put it to me during a particularly trying encounter with one of these symptoms, teenagers are our societys pain made flesh.

And if my (and your) news feed is any indication, the sickness of our self-interest is spreading no matter the amount of effort, energy and money we put into our parenting, our ZIP Codes, the professionalization of childhood, the tactical training of our teachers, or our kids ACT scores.

An answer wont likely emerge from the manic efforts of privileged people like myself.

So in the face of yet more inexplicable violence in my city, I want to argue that an answer wont likely emerge from the manic efforts of privileged people like myself. As we immediately cycle through knee-jerk attempts at grappling with the pain of oppressed communities. And as we immediately bypass this pain whenever it becomes complicated and demanding of us, our time, our money and our self-preservation.

In my personal experience, defensiveness and burned-out cynicism arent typically a recipe for transformation.

Instead, the students and faculty members I spent time with for two years in North Knoxville taught me that transformation resurrection really only comes for us whenever we reject the false capitalist binary of my life and your death, my success and your failure, my more and your nothing. Only when I choose to quietly bear witness and make unbroken eye contact with a pain that I have frequently ignored or even consumed as fuel for the alleviation of my own inherent white guilt, neediness and shame, can I finally encounter something that should have buried me, but doesnt.

Owning my complicity for what happens in East Knoxville, in Minneapolis, in Cleveland, in Charleston, and in the White House as a privileged white person from the couch, isnt some sort of political saber-rattle or virtue signal, its what my inherited evangelical tradition called an act of rededication. Its a confession, an admittance of a sinfulness that both predates and inhabits me whenever I say things like urban, impoverished, or, you know that part of town.

For, as James Baldwin argues, it is only when white Americans are brought face to face with the fictions underwriting our history, our worth, our value, our neighborhoods, and our heritage that we might finally begin questioning the crippling capitalism that has so thoroughly blinded us to the realities of the world and has left us the slightly mad victims of (our) own brainwashing.

Only the death of our crippling addiction to self-interest can save us, can free us, can resurrect us all.

When we at long last own our brainwashing, rather than losing everything weve been desperately clinging to, we white Americans are finally given opportunity to return to the truth of ourselves and the world we have wrought. A truth reminding us that individual freedom and self-interest wont ever save our schools, our communities, our families, our country or our souls. Only the death of our crippling addiction to self-interest can save us, can free us, can resurrect us all.

And if, during the struggle for the soul of our kids, our communities and our world, you come across a god, a political party, a faith, a politician, a social media platform, a corporation, an educational institution or a philosophy going by the name Christian while maintaining an unwillingness to die for the salvation of something other than itself, may you recognize it, may you face it, and may you kindly return it to its roots as a religion founded in the name of a God who dies for the world without expecting the world to return the favor.

Because as the Easter season attests, we can die alone, or we can rise, together.

Eric Mintonis a writer, pastor and therapist living with his family in Knoxville, Tenn. He holds a bachelors degree in psychology from the University of Tennessee, a master of divinity degree from Fuller Theological Seminary and a master of science degree in clinical mental health counseling from Carson-Newman University.

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Learning to see my hometown from a different perspective with a little help from my friends - Baptist News Global

Abby Innes writes that while UK governments have refrained from intervening in the private sector, they enable ever greater business access to public authority and revenue. She argues that successive policies have led to corporate state capture.

British Ministers and MPs operate with uniquely close ties to business. These ties are an essential feature of the neoliberal transformation of the state. Their vulnerability to conflicts of interest and corruption are a feature, not a bug. Under the New Public Management agenda of the last forty years, agenda-setting and policy design have increasingly been outsourced to professional consultancies, third-sector agencies, law and accountancy firms and corporate sponsored think tanks. The administrative, policymaking and agenda-revising throughputs of the state have seen greater business involvement via senior civil service recruitment and special advisors. Departmental non-executive directors have significant powers but are routinely recruited through an opaque process from businesses with a direct interest in the terrain under a departments control. Finally, the states core outputs in terms of welfare and regulation have been ever more outsourced to the private sector. The machinery of state is now porous to private business interests to a degree that is exceptional among the established democracies. A third of todays central government spending goes on outsourcing.

Britains neoliberal state has become a semi-permeable membrane in which governments refrain from intervening in the private sector but enable ever greater business access to public authority and revenue. Corporate state capture refers to the high point of corruption whereby private interests subvert legitimate channels of political influence and shape the rules of the legislative and institutional game through private payments to public officials. In Britain that influence has largely been gifted as a matter of public policy.

Britains corporate state capture by design has happened because neoliberalism is a materialist utopia. It is, in fact, the exact counterpart to its Soviet communist opponent albeit even less tethered to social reality in its theoretical foundations. Where Leninism was based on a deterministic reading of Marxs analysis of capitalist change, British neoliberal policy has been rooted in the most market-fundamentalist wing of neoclassical economics that depends on deductive-theoretic mathematical reasoning and tends to disregard market failures. The result is an agenda of beguiling simplicity. In this scheme, it is axiomatic that when you remove state intervention you improve competitiveness and allow the economy to move closer towards a general equilibrium in which demand and supply are matched with a perfect, frictionless efficiency. This is the mirror of the Soviet belief in perfectly efficient central planning.

For Britains neoliberal governments, it has followed as a matter of logic that the more the state can be got out of the way or made more business-like where it remains, the better. As a society we have moved from ethical debates about the effective government of people in a complex and uncertain world to an era in which parties have competed over the management of a pseudo-science about the allocation of things in a closed-system world of apparently little meaningful complexity at all. The seeds of state capture are sown in materialist utopias because as an article of faith they privilege the interests of one social group as the virtuous, transformative vanguard that will lead us to the Promised Land of seamless allocative efficiency. In neoliberalism it is business rather than the industrial proletariat taken to exemplify the idealised rational economic agent and business is duly endowed with the leading role in society.

In Britain, this idealisation has led successive governments to a deep lack of curiosity about the diversity and complexity of actual businesses. It has also created a profound political complacency about what drives innovation and improves productivity. The history of economic development, as distinct from the neoclassical thought experiment, tells us it is not just competition. Despite the fact that the investment culture of Britains traded companies has been hollowed out by norms of short term profit-maximisation, governments have proved resiliently indifferent to the pathologies of corporate financialisation: the extraction of profit even unto the cannibalisation of the firm itself. John McDonnell ended this complacency in Labour, but it persists across the aisle. In the meantime, Britains public sector industry firms are among the most financialised of all. Carillion and Interserve went bust because of it. Serco and the rest continue to leverage their accounts, minimise their investment and training and to sweat their public contracts and employment conditions to maximise profits. The result is a new systemic risk in which the states structural dependency upon these archetypes of rent-seeking makes them too big to fail.

The neoliberal argument for state failure that helped bring it to power in the late 1970s was built on an argument by theoretical analogy: that the state is a monopoly firm and hence the presumptively rational economic actors who run it will tend to exploit their position until the state expands into a totalitarian, socialist Leviathan. There is no concept of public service here. The neoliberal solution proceeds to build in corporate state capture via an analytical ratchet effect in which even chronic failures of neoliberal policy are assumed a priori to be the fault of public servants and their lingering attachments to the privileges of monopoly. It follows as a matter of logic that the answer is to bring in further corporate expertise to bear.

In the meantime, privileged corporate access skews ministerial interactions with other interest groups and unbalances the playing field between them. The extension of public services markets to encompass as many state functions as possible encourages escalating corporate donations to parties in search of favouritism within that dynamic. Contrary to the neoliberal and indeed Leninist fantasy in which the state will wither away to its nightwatchman minimum, the centralising neoliberal state has become a giant of procurement. Government departments are tied into a complex web of relationships with large enterprises scarcely less than in Soviet central planning, only now in super-fragmented form. Those relationships shift whole bodies of public spending from statutory to contract law and under the cloak of commercial confidentiality.

The combination of state failures and corporate state capture is tailor made to undermine public trust because it breaks the democratic fiscal contract in which tax is paid on a fair basis and revenues never confiscated. This corporate penetration of the state has occurred even as the dogmatic principle of self-regulation has been applied by politicians and there remains a near total lack of legal regulation around some of the most serious risks.

Regulatory drift occurs when formal rules are deliberately held constant in the face of major shifts in context, so that outcomes change. The UKs cross-party Committee on Standards in Public Life, the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, and the Public Accounts Select Committee have repeatedly called on governments to tighten the rules around conflicts of interest, second jobs, party finance, consultancy, lobbying and revolving doors. All of them have been rebuffed. To regulate political-corporate ties would have violated many of the core assumptions of the neoliberal project: that business actors are only ever honourable wealth-builders, that self-regulation is always superior to state action, that rational self-interest confers no unacceptable social losses.

The public reaction has been one of rising public distrust in political elites, the oxygen in which populism thrives. The most recent (2013) Transparency International Global Government Barometer showed the following attitudes for the UK:

These numbers might seem conspiratorial but what other terms should we use? We might have called it idealistic zeal in the early years of Thatcherite enterprise and New Labour modernisation, the utopianism of the project notwithstanding. At what point does it stop being good faith, however, when governments persist in the marketization of the state even in the face of systemic failures of neoliberal policy, strategy, and increasing costs? How high has the capacity for governmental self-delusion become when corporate actors are parachuted into the senior civil service and allowed to direct hard-earned public monies into even the most dubious of private hands? What else is it but corruption in its classic form when as consultants or on retirement ministers and even prime ministers charge rates of remuneration beyond the wildest dreams of the average voter in return for their knowledge and influence, from the very businesses they were supposed to govern in the public interest? Since even small side-payments are toxic to public trust, the current dispensation is surely mortal. Already by 2015 there were some 4,000 people working professionally in the UKs 2 billion lobbying industry, which made it the third largest lobby in the world. Everything, including the climate transition, is at stake unless we reverse the dynamics at hand before they reach their full, kleptocratic, Trumpian potential.

The political culture of public service inherited from the post-war era has been weakening with each new intake of Conservative MPs, though many persist with it against the odds. However, a fifth of the Conservatives 2019 new MPs had a background in lobbying or public relations. By 2020, the economic values of the partys MPs were far to the right of even their own councillors and party members, let alone the wider electorate. Johnsons second Cabinet is comprised of the parliamentary partys most committed economic libertarians and since coming to power they have sought to shatter this culture from the top. The Prime Minister himself has shown an overt nihilism around standards in public life, as indicated by the resignation of his Advisor on those standards and the failure to replace him. Even as tens of thousands of people died needlessly of Covid-19 because of late intervention, a VIP lane for procurement was organised so that suppliers with government contacts were ten times more likely to be awarded a procurement contract than those who applied to the Department of Health and Social Care.

What comparative history teaches us is that once the dynamics of corporate state capture take hold the risk is that political parties themselves become targets for those who choose politics for primarily private gain. If they rise to the top, the risk is that elections cease to be about representation and become the point of market entry and exit. Political parties become corporate brokers who oversee the continuous distribution of public revenue and rents into private hands. A populist, authoritarian politics becomes the effective way to corner this market.

Even in the context of a public health crisis, the Johnson Government exhibited an ideological allergy to engaging with public sector expertise and capacity until absolutely forced to by events. For economic libertarians, it is really not clear that there is any intrinsic moral injunction against their own private enterprise en route. Just as Leninism and Stalinism had stripped out the radical democratic republicanism of Karl Marx, so too neoliberalism in its purest form picks liberalism clean of its nineteenth and early-twentieth century ethical debates about the nature of republican virtues.

For economic libertarians, in principle the marketplace is designated as the sphere of true freedom: the only republic. The history of late stage materialist utopias in practice, however, is that in the absence of a viable social contract, the nexus between the governing regime and its society becomes that of a protection racket. Insofar as Rishi Sunak has proved keen on public spending, it is directed far more obviously at political self-perpetuation than the public interest: in the new 1billion Towns Fund justified as a way to level up deprived communities, 40 of the 45 chosen areas had a Conservative MP. An additional 4.6 billion fund was likewise found to include wealthy Conservative constituencies, even as some of the poorest cities in the country, such as Salford, which voted Labour, were relegated to a lower funding tier. As the sociologist Ken Jowitt concluded of the USSR: Brezhnevs novelty seems to have been to take the Partys organizational corruption and elevate it to the status of an organizational principle. The serious question for Conservative backbench MPs is whether, on reflection, they are willing to participate in their partys final ruin as a democratic entity, and to see the concepts of liberty and love of country deployed as their alibi.

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About the Author

Abby Innes is an Assistant Professor at the European Institute of the LSE. She has written extensively on the political economy of corruption in Central Europe and is part of a UN/NYU transnational working group on corporate state capture. She is completing a manuscript on the systematic affinities between Neoliberal and Soviet economics. Its working title isLate Soviet Britain: The Political Economy of State Failure in Materialist Utopias.

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

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Corporate state capture: the degree to which the British state is porous to business interests is exceptional among established democracies - British...