Rising East Essays

Introduction

The sky looms large where walls and roofs should be. The only things standing are steel girders, forming triangles and rectangles in a curiously abstract representation of the exhibition centre. Of phones, computers and conference tables – all the accoutrements of international relations in the network society, there is no sign; it’s as if they have been obliterated.

This was the empty shell of ExCel in East London, on the day the G20 leaders narrowly escaped the awful reality which came dangerously close to rupturing their peaceful co-existence.

No, the summit wasn’t blown up by a bomb; neither has there been a conspiracy to cover up the blow up. This is not 9/11-2.0, nor the 21st century equivalent of Capricorn One. The simple explanation for the naked frame of the exhibition hall is that the eastern aspect of the ExCel is being extended. Beginning with the steel frames of new buildings, construction work is under way which will result in more exhibition space, making ExCel even more of a magnet for international trade fairs and conferences. Meanwhile the G20 summit took place in another part of the complex – what will become its west end, when the rest is completed.

And there were no disruptions to the summit; instead it went pretty much according to plan.

If it was only by chance that the extension of East London’s largest exhibition centre coincided with its 48-hour placement at the centre of the world, nonetheless the hollow end of ExCel says something important about what happened in the facing wing where the G20 summit took place. It so happens that the empty shell reflects the emptiness of the summit itself; conversely, the lack of substance at the west end of ExCel was represented in the hollow form of the east end. For instead of levelling with the essence of the current recession, the G20 summit rose to phenomenal heights of self-delusion.

There were no actual conspiracies, whether to bomb the summit, storm it, or even to cover up an attack on it. Instead within the summit itself various teacup-sized storms served as cover, drawing attention away from the new expression of the contradiction between social production and privatised exchange, between manufacture in the East and finance in the West [link to Poynter]. The origins of the current recession lie in this geographical imbalance which is itself in line with the contradiction essential to the historically specific form of social relations known as ‘capitalism’. Though there were no outright conspiracies at ExCel, not to address this fundamental problem was an act of contrivance on a par with pretending that the summit was about to be attacked, or covering up the fact that it had been.

In this essay I seek to establish the real character of such contrivance; or, rather, to show that inside and outside the ExCel centre, the summit, its media coverage and many of the responses to both, together comprised a contrived attempt to avoid the social reality of today’s East-West relations. This essay suggests that apart from heroes of powerfully progressive agency (Barack Obama, Gordon Brown), the summit also contrived to produce folk devils of equally mythical proportions (anarchist ‘anti-capitalists’, for example); moreover that in its mythical character each of these personality sets (villain as well as hero) served not only to invite unnecessary fear and/or undue optimism, but also to elude the pressing, present-day problem of East-West relations and their future ramifications.

It seems we prefer to wrap ourselves in comfortingly familiar fantasies and at the same time scare ourselves with fantastic devils derived from folk we already know – anything, rather than confront the reality of the unknown.

By pairing first politicians and the press, then protestors and the police, I try to uncover some of the workings of each, and endeavour to establish that these couplets have been operating as reciprocal fantasies. In positioning them thus, I am of course abstracting from the various, stated intentions of these different, interest groups, the better to synthesise the actual outcome of their interactions.

Since such criticism depends on abstraction, it is necessarily abstract; and to counter this tendency, I have interleaved it with another sequence of written material. Dubbed ‘Depiction’, this latter takes the form of an address to a long-lost friend of mine, Ford’s worker and union activist Jimmy Sarwah. References to his life of 20-odd years ago, in an area of East London not far from what is now the site of ExCel, together with my guesswork (it is no more than that) as to what may have been the course of his life since then, are presented here as ground-level indications of the global social forces which were represented, mis-represented and grossly under-represented when the G20 swept into town and out again.

Interweaving two or more strands of material is old hat in artistic circles; but it is not what is usually expected of the essay format. In case some readers are annoyed by this experiment, the two strands are arranged here in parallel sequences so that it is possible to read one in isolation from the other; or, if the reader will be guided by the author, to read them both by alternating between each of the two.

Accordingly, the text which follows is divided into numbered sections. Apart from this first, introductory section (No 1), the ‘Depiction’ strand occupies the remaining odd numbers; ‘Criticism’ takes up the even numbers. Their combination is intended to offer both the simplifying force of abstraction and something of the rich texture of lived experience. Please let me know whether you think this combination bears repeating in future essays.

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Criticism: Sideshows Occupy Centre Stage

In the run-up to the summit, there were occasional suggestions that the G20 was really the G2, i.e. that the impression of 20 of the world’s most powerful countries coming together in London would be superseded by the reality of only the two most powerful countries, the USA and China, combining to set the agenda. If only the event itself had lived up to this fleeting prognosis! Instead of engaging with the pronounced and highly problematic trends towards the alienation of production in the East from the increased financialisation of the West, the G20 found thousands of ways to tell a different story – a myth of international relations in which even recession is taken to mean business as usual.

Accordingly, if you scan the pages and pages of over 4000 G20 news items aggregated by Google, apart from occasional exceptions such as the Daily Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal, the only outlets leading on China’s role at the summit are Chinese themselves, or based in South-East Asia. Similarly, by 16/4/09 the question briefly posed at Yahoo! Answers, ‘G20 or G2 – which would be more productive?’, has already been deleted. As far as Yahoo and its users are concerned, there is seemingly no need to continue to address the burning question of our age.

As an opportunity to address the historic problem of the twenty-first century, namely, East-West relations, the G20 summit did not take place. It failed to occur either in the conference hall itself, or in media coverage which could have responded to this strange absence as well as providing reportage of what was being said and done.

Again, there are occasional, honourable exceptions, such as Martin Wolf’s insistence (Wolf 2009) that the USA should engage with the global economic policy proposals put forward by Governor Zhou Xiaochuan of the People’s Bank of China (Zhou: 2009). For the most part, however, Western politicians and a compliant commentariat have contrived to avoid the reality shaping the current recession – the imbalance between production in the East and financialisation in the West; still less have they sought to address this imbalance by reconfiguring the frameworks of international relations so that, for example, China’s political role might approximate to the social weight and global significance of its recent economic performance.

The way it was played out, the G20 summit of April 2009 could have been happening a century earlier, in April 1909. The protagonists in the ExCel saga were dead ringers for the leading characters a hundred years before: the USA, UK, France and Germany, with Italy once again providing light relief (this time round: Mr Berlusconi and his gaffes). When conflict between Continental Europe and ‘the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism’ (UK/USA), was trumped up as the fault line in need of the most urgent correction, the summit set itself up to re-play the history of the twentieth century (competition between Britain, France and Germany, with the USA out-flanking all three – does this sound familiar?), instead of dealing with the here and now.

No wonder President Obama and Prime Minister Brown managed to look heroic: they were performing in a reconstruction of the 20th century (with jaw-jaw standing in for war-war), lacking in foresight and acting on hindsight in accordance with a well-worn script. Their achievement was neither historic, as they claimed; nor ‘an almost historic compromise’, as it was described by Chancellor Merkel. Instead of making history, they capitulated to the past.

Although in one sense the same old generals were staging a familiar drama in the theatre of the 1900s, in other respects the G20 summit was very much of its particular time. Its lightness of being would have been unbearable, inconceivable, in previous times. That the First Lady’s fashion sense could have received more news coverage (not only in Features or in women’s magazines) than the presence in London of Hu Jintao or the existence of one-and-a-third billion people in China, suggests that for Western politicians, editors and readers alike, discriminating between weighty stories and what once would have been sidelined as trivia and titbits, is now harder to accomplish; and without a widely accepted scale of measurement, each aspect of every event may appear almost equally weightless.

Even weightlessness is grounded, however. If stories surrounding the G20 seem vapid, their vaporous quality must have originated partly in the atmospherics of making out that the 21st century would be almost identical to the one before. But weightlessness in Western politics is not only a sign of distortion. It is also a true and accurate representation of economic trends and cultural developments in these same countries.

Politics-lite accords with significant areas of major Western economies which have lost their centre of gravity. Where exchange has become estranged from production (the latter transferred elsewhere), the guiding influence of the law of value, its determining role in the production of commodities and the reproduction of social relations, will have been similarly displaced from specific localities and their surrounding regions. Thus while politics everywhere continue to operate as the continuation of economics by other means, the financialisation of major Western economies means that their regional, increasingly parochial politics will have come to represent exchange without production; not as before, the continuation of production for exchange (and its inherent contradictions).

Though the world as a whole is not living on thin air, some of the most important parts of the most significant Western countries – London, for example, do exist in an increasingly rarefied atmosphere which contains peculiarly weightless politics concomitant with finance-led economics. The anomaly of the G20 summit is not that such developments were represented – it would have been anomalous had they not; but that relatively weightless Westerners got away with dominating the scene to the point where the politics of production, and the various Eastern politicians representing it, hardly appeared on the scales.

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Depiction: Docked at Dagenham

Where were you, Jimmy Sarwah, when the G20 came to town? You could have almost walked to their meeting place from your old house by the A13. Except you couldn’t have walked. Couldn’t get near Excel: too much security; so much concern for world leaders and their personal safety.

The funny thing is, though I haven’t spoken to you nor hardly even thought of you for 20 years, for some reason I’m oddly concerned about you, Jimmy Sarwah, Ford’s Dagenham assembly-line worker (ret’d), former shop steward in the Transport and General Workers’ Union, proud wearer of a carefully plucked, pencil thin moustache (like a lady’s eyebrow on each side of your top lip).

Do you ever go back to Dagenham Dock? Why would you, when there’s not much going on there? So quiet nowadays, it’s where driving instructors take new pupils for their first lesson.

In the post-industrial estate alongside Ford’s Dagenham, the foxes are having a field day: appropriately named, Thames Gateway Park.

It hasn’t shut down completely (unlike this year’s Motor Show, cancelled in March), but in 2009 Ford’s Dagenham employees number only four percent of their 50 000 peak, reached 50 years ago. No longer a workforce; more like a suggestion of workers.

There’s one, wearing blue overalls and ear muffs, sneaking out of the foundry for a breath of air. Or perhaps a cigarette in the ‘smoking zone’ – what looks like a bus shelter plonked between factory wall and barbed wire fence.

He says what you said to me, Jimmy, when we first met: ‘I can’t talk here. See me outside the gates and I’ll tell you what’s happening’.

Meanwhile the stamping machine carries on, sounds like a snare drum from out here, its signature noises playing out in 6/8 time.

If you stood here, Jimmy, I bet the noises of the past would be louder in your ears than the understated rhythms of the present. They would be deafening, the collected sounds of 80 years’ work since the foundations of Ford’s Dagenham were laid by Henry’s son Edsel in 1929. And what would you see, Jimmy? No doubt the assembly line has impressed itself on your eyeballs for ever, like the ghost of a homepage on an old computer screen. Although car assembly ended here in 2002, I bet you can’t get it out of your head…….

The line. Waits for no man.

Watching it go by (as foremen and managers do, the eyes and mouths of blind, dumb capital), the assembly line seems to move slowly. But just you try working on it: pick up the part, bring it into position, wrap yourself around the car as it moves inexorably forwards, fit the part, check it’s fitted correctly, stand back while the car moves on to the next man in line, turn around, pick up the next part…..

Don’t think about it, mind. Don’t mind. Put your mind out of mind. Think of something, anything else but being here. Play a game of football in your head, write songs. Christ, you could even write a novel. What matters is you think yourself somewhere else. If your mind stays on the job, you’ll end up like the man on the line who started hitting the cars with a rolled up newspaper.

Was it one of mine, Jimmy? the next step – workers’ paper, against management and labour bureaucracy in (almost) equal measure. Never sold so many as on the day you told your blokes to buy it, when they all came teeming off the night shift. Your lot were the centre spread, though. ‘Our class is alive and kicking, reports Andrew Calcutt from Ford’s Dagenham’. Was this the industrial action against ‘Japanisation’ (speeding up the line, Just In Time delivery, quality circles, all tied to an unprecedented three-year pay deal)? That would have been early 1986; or perhaps two years later, when there were wildcat strikes without waiting for permission from Transport House (union HQ), in what turned out to be the last reflex of a hanging man.

Eighteenth months afterwards, when the Berlin Wall came crashing down, the forward march of labour turned to dust.

But when labour was organised (and not simply by management), what joy it was to stop the line. Not only for the better wages and improved conditions which short, sharp strikes often obtained (‘perks’, the right-wing papers called them, as if having a shower after eight hours of breathing in dust so thick it lies on the floor ankle-deep, can be called a ‘perk’); but also for the brief statement written into every stoppage: we’re back; our minds and bodies are together again; we willed it so, it will be so, for as long as we determine that the line stays stopped.

It’s said that Ford’s workers used to stop the line because they didn’t like the music coming out of the Tannoy. But they didn’t really do it to swap one mindless track for another. What they loved was the sound of silence; the machine stopping; their own minds and bodies gearing together in the space they made by stopping the production line.

At the high point of ‘industrial militancy’, one in four working days was lost to production, i.e. nothing was produced. Looked at from the other side, for three out of four days Dagenham workers lost their humanity to the divisive, invasive force of capitalist production, reuniting their own hearts and minds and bodies only on the down days, which at most amounted to a quarter of their working lives. During the other three days out of four, the self-confessed ‘living dead’ agreed not only to expend their strength but also to suspend their subjectivity in exchange for a living wage, and a half-decent life outside Ford’s.

Strange but true, life outside the plant was oriented to the very thing that Ford workers produced inside it: the car. It was the car which represented the driving force of their working lives and their ambition to ride that force, to steer it in directions of their own choosing. An open road was an open world, and the petrol-fuelled power to run right through it.

Sub-Freudians and post-Freudians have talked long and hard about cars and the male sex drive. But cars were more important than that. All of human, social life is there in the car – in this commodity which like all commodities, represents both the commonality of human labour and its coercion by capital. Moreover, this particular commodity, the engine of our personal mobility, also represents our ambition to overcome the coercive character of capital, to transcend its capacity to put us in our (work)place, and allocate our time accordingly; every one of us like Jimmy Sarwah, the man on the line at Ford’s Dagenham.

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Criticism: Partners In Presentation

In the City streets away from ExCel, other performances were being presented. Warning that this was the start of a ‘summer of discontent’, the police presented themselves as the immovable force, a source of implacable virtue, standing between world leaders and the swirling mayhem of vice-ridden, ‘anti-capitalist’ protestors. City types were even advised either to stay away from work or to dress down for it, lest the baying mob pick them out and string them up.

ExCel was cordoned off; meanwhile demonstrators were cordoned in – ‘kettled’. ‘Fortress London’, as the Times described it 1, became the sound stage for a B-movie in which pantomime protestors, dressed to impress, sang songs and occasionally tussled with boys in blue. It was like Gilbert and Sullivan directed by Roger Corman. Not even the fact that a few stunts went badly, sadly wrong, and some stuntmen were filmed going out of control, can detract from the staged character of the whole affair. To the contrary, that there was so much filming in the first place, and that subsequently so many of these shots have been played over and over again on television and online, can only add to the cinematic effect.

Critics such as Frank Furedi and Brendan O’Neill at spiked-online (Furedi 2009; Rothschild and O’Neill 2009), have already noted that the melodramatic character of police preparations for the G20 summit constituted a theatrical invitation to stage a riot; and that protestors duly obliged not with uncontrolled violence but by giving a performance of ‘anti-capitalism’. These criticisms are pertinent. In addition, it should be noted that the presentational exercise on the streets of London (police vs protestors) was matched by the series of presentations occurring inside ExCel: the presentation of Brown and Obama as heroes of our time, based on their performance of scenarios from another age; the orchestrated presence of manageable dissent at G20 press conferences, with non-mainstream bloggers 2 facilitated by the Foreign Office to provide an alternative voice (Cellan-Jones 2009); and the readiness of G20 insiders to present themselves to other insiders for the purpose of recording each other’s presence there. Quite apart from the G20 group photograph, which cannot be anything but staged, there were reports of government officials asking other officials to photograph them in the corridors and coffee-stations of ExCel, as if the whole event was set up with Facebook in mind.

Of course it is perverse that the opportunity for world leaders to intervene in the course of historical developments, should have been squandered for the sake of so many self-serving presentations. But presentation-fixation has its own logic; furthermore, it is based in material conditions which are historically and geographically specific.

In particular areas of the West which have only recently become alienated from production, exchange is now a whole way of life. As it pertains to those areas (if not to the global economy as a whole), what precedes exchange is not production, for this has seceded, but the continuous presentation of that which is to be exchanged. As they are transactional, the financial markets are equally presentational; and, accordingly, financial economies are also economies of presentation. Thus the UK’s heavily financialised economy is an amphitheatre of presentation, and this sets the tone for the surrounding culture.

If the Cartersian cogito was an idealistic inversion of privatised commodity production, in the financialised economies of the West a more appropriate ontological statement would be: manifesto ergo sum – I show myself therefore I am. From book-keeping to Facebook, presentation (not production) is now the local human condition – the condition of being human and the qualification for being recognised as such.

It is not that presentation is an entirely new element in international relations. The deliberately splendid setting of the Locarno Room in Whitehall, is one of many examples which suggest that presentation has always been significant. But the significance of the G20 is that there was no reality check against the narrow preoccupation with presentation.

This was not merely a hangover from centuries of Western supremacy; it is fully representative of recent developments in which the West has moved a long way towards making its whole way of life out of presentation and exchange. In re-iterating this trend at the level of international relations, the G20 summit revealed itself as the conservative continuation of financialisation and its problematic estrangement from production. As such, instead of addressing the problem of worldwide recession, it was inextricably bound up with the very same trends which have prompted it.

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Depiction: Exchange of Life

What of your children, Jimmy? Did they get the jobs the in the City you had in mind for them? Not for them the tension and tedium of the line; nor a dead-end job in the bright lights and lurid gold jewellery of the shops in Green Street, a bus-ride from the terraced house (Edwardian Empire vintage) where you brought them up. I’d say they were aged eight and 10 when, unexpectedly, you invited me to your house for Saturday supper. (By the way, I’m sorry I left you alone in the pub at 9pm that night. I’ve always regretted it, but I was a revolutionary with a whole book to read before ‘chapel’ on Sunday morning.)

Your kids would have been the right age to enter the City as it continued to expand, money making money in a ‘new economy’. In one generation, maybe the Sarwahs managed to trade up from Dagenham Dock to Fenchurch Street: only a 15 minute train journey, Jimmy, but your whole life was the price of their season ticket.

What does he call himself, your boy? ‘Jimmy Jnr’, I think I heard you say; my guess is he wasn’t having that. ‘Jawaharlal?’ – too long; maybe ‘Jawa’ for short. Let’s say he’s ‘Jawa’, and every morning Hugo Boss-suited Jawa travels into Fenchurch Street fiddling with his Blackberry and his iPod Touch, then, cappuccino in hand, sits down in front of a trading screen. He is greeted by his computer: ‘Good morning, Jawa’, it chirps as he logs on. How about that, Jimmy? Jawa’s machine is his obedient servant, not lord and master like the line was to you.

Finance is flirting. No, not just a bad pun on FTSE and footsie: Jimmy, your son is a professional flirt. Buying and selling, he winks at the guys who stroke the stocks that tickle the bonds, and everybody (nearly everybody) squeals with delight and makes oodles of money – until recently.

Flirting is for show, and showing to the market is what Jawa does. I’ll show and you tell me how much you want my packet, baby. How much will you give me for it, bitch? That’s his line of work, that’s how he performs. And his is the business of show: showbiz. Finance is showbiz for money, where money is the lead actor, understudied by people like your Jawa.

Scores of them in an enormous office, upturned faces leaning into monitors, scanning data, so absorbed their expressions are almost childlike. Occasional shouts and groans like cattle lowing. Colleagues clustering and conferring, but the only constant sound is the chatter of scurrying keyboards, talking money to each other.

It’s not scripted in advance. Jawa’s not bored to the point of brain death, like you were, Jimmy. Jawa’s job occupies his mind, whereas yours colonised your body and told your mind to emigrate.

He earns more, he lives better than you; but he feels disconnected. Oh, he’s networked – the Blackberries and all the other fruits keep him permanently in the field, day and night. But the network is only ever one person talking to another in a never-ending sequence of never-changing insignificance. The show is all surface, but you can’t even say it’s superficial: perspective would be quite wrong in his transactional world, because it really is flat – flat as a pre-Renaissance painting.

Unlike the world of your work. The centralised structure for making cars on an industrial scale; the abstraction of your labour-power: they both looked towards a vanishing point, sharply drawn to the point at which your humanity nearly vanished, all but consumed in the production of cars and capital. But the point is, there was a point. You, me, we could not but be drawn into it. Drawn to this vortex and at the same time pushed out in front of it, we all owed our existence to capitalist production.

Whereas Jawa’s never been part of anything that is universal. He’s linked to thousands of other individuals but he isn’t automatically connected to everyone else, the way we were. Our kind of association is something that his way of working does not afford; and there’s nowhere else in his life he can get it from.

Facebooked, Bebo-ed, constantly Twittering, Jawa spends so much time (work time, his own time) showing himself to other people and trying to connect himself to them, all the time aching for the hard-wiring he cannot have.

So what do you think of him, Jimmy? When you look him over, clocking his clothes, taking in his skin, the healthy texture of it, are you pleased that, yes, this is my son, who doesn’t have to meet the physical demands made of me? No need to ask if you remember doing ‘strange time’ – shift work, joints stiffened, eyes straining to cope with lights that shouldn’t be so bright at this time of night, sometimes you were worn out even before you started. Seeing Jawa, does it make you want to pinch him, this soft lad of yours, like an overgrown baby or a prince who’s never had to lift a finger?

As I said, Jimmy, I’m concerned about you. I can’t help thinking that you and yours – the thousands who did what you did at Ford’s Dagenham – were what mattered then, nearly 25 years ago when we first met. But now the matter the world is made of, is mostly made somewhere else. And nowadays you are of no concern.

Oh, I don’t mean family and friends – I wasn’t saying you don’t have any; rather that you are of no wider concern. In the scheme of things, where it counts, you don’t.

Unless perhaps you went back where your parents came from, when they brought Boy Jimmy with them on the boat in 1959. If you did go back, you could even be a senior foreman, pompously personifying the inestimable wealth of experience, moustache as white as your coat, supervising assembly of the Tata Nano, patrolling the light, bright line that recently began to produce ‘The People’s Car’ (1,150,000 rupees; on sale July 2009).

You’re OK with computers, then? Maybe this time, in this instance, the world has skipped back a generation, making the father more future-oriented than his son who deals in futures.

But I doubt it. My instincts tell me otherwise, Jimmy. I reckon you are still somewhere in East London, retired but keeping busy, just about managing to stop the Dagenham line looping continuously through your head.

I wish you well. I hope there’s a new settee under your sloppy arse; and a new carpet underneath the settee. Please, not for you the sour smell of making do, and doing less now the money only goes so far.

Here’s health and wealth to you, Jimmy Sarwah. Wherever you are, I hope you enjoy the cricket this summer.

Andrew Calcutt is editor of Rising East.

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References

• Cellan-Jones, R (2009) ‘G20: the social media battle’, dot.life – a blog about technology from BBC News, 31st March 2009, accessed 16/4/2009.
• Furedi, F (2009) ‘A Caricature Of A Riot’, spiked-online, 2nd April 2009, accessed 16/4/09.
• Rothschild, N and O’Neill, B (2009) ‘Painting the Protesters’, caption by Brendan O’Neill for Photograph No 9 taken by Nathalie Rothschild, published in photo-essay ‘Your Guide To The “Belly of the Beast”,’ spiked-online 3rd April 2009, accessed 16/4/2009.
• Wolf, M (2009) ‘What the G2 must discuss now the G20 is over’, the Financial Times 7th April 2009, accessed 16/4/2009.
• Zhou, X (2009) ‘Some Observations and Analyses on Savings Ratios’, published by the People’s Bank of China, 10th February 2009, accessed 16/4/2009.

Notes

1. 1The link here is to online coverage, but the headline ‘Fortress London’ also featured on the front page of the print edition of the Times, accessed 16/4/2009
2. 2Cellan-Jones identifies British government involvement with the following websites: www.yoosklondonsummit.com and www.whiteband.action.org/g20voice, both accessed 16/4/2009

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