Immortal Technique, stage name of Peruvian born Felipe Andres Coronel, released his new album “The Martyr”, completely free to download yesterday.

Needless to say, I have had it on loop since last night and my immediate impression of it is that it is a work of incredible commitment by a workaholic independent MC who was raised in Harlem, New York, and became politicised from an early age.

Immortal Technique (IT) has always written provocative lyrics with themes ranging from the institutional racism embedded within capitalism, the injustices of globalisation, corporate greed, censorship, and oppression.

What is apparent in this new effort is the broadening of approach in handling the often very polemical content in the verses. The album also features notable artists such as Dead Prez, Vinnie Paz (of Jedi Mind Trick’s fame), Brother Ali with even Chuck D (Public Enemy) making an appearance among others.

The album opens with an interlude which calls for you to “burn this for every motherfucker you know”. After all, its free. The idea here, which has been muddled as of late in hip hop, is that the message has become so muted, it is more important than the money, it has gone beyond it and travelled full circle (because lets face it, with record labels now manufacturing “the best rappers” around, the culture of hip hop has largely changed through the lens of public life into a pseudo-culture dominated by braggers). As veteran MC RA the Rugged Man once said, “you’re only as successful as how much they spend on you”. Immortal Technique has rejected that artificial dependency and sought ways around it.

“I need you to think for you and stop being a servant”

The title track, “The Martyr”, then opens with the IT almost picking up from where he left off in his last offering “The 3rd World”, almost challenging the beat to outdo him and his poignant lyricism – something rather unique to IT and his work. Whereas a lot of MCs overlay their verses on a beat which seem largely divorced from the lyrical material, there is a genuine sense that the two are conjoined in IT’s work. This is especially apparent as the album continues with the melancholic “Angels & Demons”, featuring infamous rap duo Dead Prez.

Following this, a definite stand-out track begins: “Rich Man’s World (1%)”. This has taken the Twittersphere by storm, and rightly so. Never has a more cynical (and believe me, its cynical) and comical (he has sampled ABBA’s “Money Money Money” in it) exposition of the so called “1%” and their lifestyle been made before. In this track more than anywhere else, IT truly demonstrates that, while lyrically driven, he certainly has the technique to relay the content given all of the rhyme structures and effective time-lapsing.

“[…] only little people pay all these taxes and fees / since you were born we control what you watch and you read / and pretty soon we’re gonna own the fucking air that you breathe / I take what I want – fucker – I don’t have to say please / I convince you that its good for you / take it and leave / you think presidents are the face of a nation? / I put them all where they are / end of the conversation”

“Toast to the Dead”, a late and great J Dilla production, is a solid track quite reminiscent of IT’s work on Revolutionary Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, taking on the form of an inward reflection of defiance and struggle, but ultimately resilience.

Sure to be another fan favourite, “Goonies Never Die”, then begins with a playful beat sampling the memorable film’s theme. Adopting a similar kind of tone to “Rich Man’s World”, this song trumpets along pleasantly into the more pensive yet uplifting “Natural Beauty”.

The mood suddenly changes in “Civil War”. If hip hop could make you march, this could be the song. A heavily political diatribe against the assumptions and preconceptions we have in our society which keep us divided along artificial lines, distracting us from the dividers at the top who prosper because of it.

“[…] I never hate on the south / I respect their vision / I just hate on niggas that promote samboism / and white execs that love to see us in that position / they reflect the stereotypes of America’s vision / they want dancing cooning and hollering / only respect us for playing sports and modelling / modern racism? / its stay in your place-ism / while people trapped in practical black face-ism / so fuck a civil war between the north and the south / its between field niggas and slaves that are stuck in the house”

Sandwiched between probably my least favourite tracks, “Mark of the Beast” and “Young Lords”, “Black Vikings” explodes in all of its confrontational glory, challenging the listener to first bear the sonic assault before actually revelling in its aggression and energy. If “Civil War” made you march, this track will surely make you join the vanguard.

“We may not run America, but we make America run”

The penultimate track “Ultimas Palabras” (“Last Words”) has been stylised as a public speech. Departing from a similar track of IT’s, “The Poverty of Philosophy” where IT overlayed his spoken words over an accommodative beat, “Ultimas Palabras” has an audible audience. It is another act of trying to eloquently raise awareness about the corrupt elite in politics and business, ending with a rather dramatic conclusion, and opening into what IT described as his favourite track on Twitter: “Sign of the Times”. Its understandable to see why.

This track is simply an incredible piece of music. Fusing cultural melodies and instruments together with the most passionate and concise I have ever heard IT probably since the title of track of “The 3rd World”.

It would have been fantastic to hear renowned MCs such as Chino XL and Canibus on the album, but that is a juvenile gripe of mine as a fan wishing to play fantasy rap.

Despite the numerous MCs featured, the best thing about this album is Immortal Technique himself – this is a trend true of all the best MCs. It is visible to see how he has managed to refine his MCing skills as well as taking on melodies and beats which, even more than before, compliment the lyrical content. The album itself could not be more timely either, with occupations around the world raising awareness and protesting against growing inequalities, corporate greed, and how the “1%” are living ever more lavish lives, often at our expense. It will certainly resonate. 

Some critics claim his material is too monotonous, convoluted and bordering, if not completely espousing, conspiracy theory. Yet, with powerful and effective aphoristic lines such as “live for revolution, instead of always dying for it”, I think it is safe to say the message has developed and matured into something which has become more tangible and accessible. The message isn’t stylised as one man against the odds we should cheer on, it is a metaphorical call to arms.

Immortal Technique, unlike many other MCs who are obsessed with reinventing themselves to energise marketing campaigns, finds his niche impersonally – a welcome and rare thing in modern hip hop.

Toy Story 3 is many things: heartwarming, tragic, nuanced, beautiful, and, if you stop to think about it, really quite disturbing. Not just because of all the dark ‘adult’ themes that so many critics have picked up on, but also because of the message. And yes, to forestall the chorus of objection that I’m sure this review is about to receive, of course it has a damn message. It’s produced by Pixar for Disney, and since those companies are part of big Hollywood studios and their films are aimed at kids, those films have messages, and those messages aren’t subtle. The message in Wall-E? Our lazy, wasteful Western lifestyles are killing the planet. Monsters Inc? Don’t be scared of something just because it’s unfamiliar. The Incredibles? Elitism is good, and vigilante justice isn’t half bad either (basically the exact polar opposite of Watchmen). And Toy Story 3? The only way to be safe and happy is to be the possession of one of your social superiors, who you should stick with no matter how badly they treat you, and the promise of liberty is nothing but an illusion.

Image: coolinsights/flickr

The plot, very briefly, is as follows (spoiler warning, obviously). Andy is going to college, and his mother demands that he decide what to do with his old toys. Or what’s left of them, anyway; a lot of the toys from the previous films, including Woody’s beloved Bo Peep, have already gone, presumably thrown out (and, as becomes clear, later incinerated). The remaining toys are understandably apprehensive about their future, but Woody – who as Andy’s favourite and oldest toy occupies a relatively privileged position, as illustrated shortly afterwards by Andy choosing Woody alone to take with him to college – tells them they should trust Andy to do the right thing and remain loyal to him (despite the fact that he hasn’t played with them – the raison d’être for toys, obviously – in many years, and fairly clearly has no plans to do so in the foreseeable future, what with not being a child anymore and all). After a mix up in which Andy intends to put the toys in the attic but they nearly get thrown out by mistake, the toys decide to get in a box destined to be donated to Sunnyside daycare centre (a nursery), on the entirely reasonable grounds that they’ll get played with more there. Woody goes with them, but tries to change their minds, urging them once again to remain loyal to Andy.

The toys get to the daycare centre, and are informed that here they’re not owned by individual children; they own themselves, will always get played with because new children come in as the older ones grow up and leave, and will have everything they need as long as they stay at the centre. Woody continues to try and persuade the other toys to go back to Andy, but fails and he leaves alone. But the daycare centre, far from being a utopia, is a brutal hierarchical dictatorship ruled with an iron fist by ‘Lotso’ Lots O’Huggin’ Bear; newly arrived toys at the centre have to endure being played with by the youngest children, (who are too rough for Andy’s toys to cope with) and are locked up every night, and any subversives are routinely tortured or reprogrammed to ensure their loyalty. Woody finds out about what has happened to the other toys, rescues them, and manages to trick Andy into donating them to Bonnie, one of the children from Sunnyside.

Got that? You’re bought and sold, and your duty is to stay loyal to your owner, no matter how badly he treats you, how many of your friends and loved ones he gets rid of because they no longer interest him, or how long he neglects you for. If he wants to abandon you in the attic, you should be grateful – he could be throwing you out, after all. Oh, and if anyone tells you that this isn’t the way things have to be, if they tell you that maybe if you had some autonomy then you’d be able to live a decent life not dependent on the whims of those more powerful than you, then that person is a lying wannabe Stalin who’d imprison and torture you without a second thought. The continued goodwill of your private owner is the only guarantor of happiness and security. There is no freedom. There is no alternative. There is no hope.

But hey, it’s just a kids’ film, right?

When I received my review copy of Spirit Level Film’s latest documentary, The Fear Factory, through my letterbox a few days ago, I had little idea what to expect. A few seconds in, as the ominous music begins to play and the image of a foetus looms into view accompanied by the voiceover telling us that young offenders will be growing up in gaol and that we are heading for the largest prison population that any country could imagine having, it became clear to me that this was a film that was attempting to ask a number of crucial questions of deep moral and social significance. But did it answer them satisfactorily?

The timing of The Fear Factory couldn’t have been more appropriate, emerging as it has just as the return of John Venables to prison for an unspecified violation kicked up a media storm and a renewed public outcry over the murder of James Bulger. The central point that the filmmakers want to get across is that when it comes to crime and punishment, we are as far removed as one can possibly imagine from the evidence-based policy that this government claimed to represent. Instead what we have is moral panic fed by an hysterical media in which the public’s fear of youth crime is wholly disproportionate to any real statistics. What this has led to is an “arms race” between the main political parties over who can appear toughest on crime as both engage in a race to the bottom to bring in tougher penalties and build more prisons whilst the population behind bars soars.

These points are, for the most part, conveyed through a series of somewhat awkwardly cut interviews with prominent talking heads. Having managed to bag the likes of Cherie Blair, Dominic Grieve, David Howarth and an eloquent murderer who now writes for The Guardian, the filmmakers have clearly assembled an impressive roster. However, with very little else besides the odd flash here and there of what could be archive footage, a stereotypically deep and menacing narration and a second or two of questionably selected music, the overreliance on truth by authority makes for a documentary that is informative, but not terribly engaging. The most entertaining moment comes when the Deputy Editor of The Sun attempts to tell us that because politicians listen to the bullshit he puts in the editorial on a whim, they have no principles.

It is quite evident, of course, that The Fear Factory is not there to entertain, or even to inform, but to persuade. Whilst it features a few comments from oppositional figures, they are largely there to look stupid and look stupid they do. This is not an expose or investigative journalism. This is a propaganda film and it should make no apologies about that. Besides decrying the rising prison population and the media and political hysteria that have caused it, the film asks us to question whether people are born bad or if their crimes are a product of the society in which they grew up, and it touches upon the philosophy of prison itself – whether it should be a means of reform or retribution.

Where the filmmakers stand on this issue is quite clear, but my personal feeling is the message, which at times sounds like it is being shouted from a soapbox, will divide opinion. It is easy for bleeding heart liberals like myself who studied Foucault in their second year Social & Political Sciences paper at Cambridge to agree with everything The Fear Factory has to say. I very much doubt those who are paid £700k a year to demonise Britain’s youth in the country’s most odious tabloids will be swayed and for them this film, much like prison, will sadly be more retributive than reformative.

In any case, The Fear Factory is well worth a look and is available for pre-order on DVD now.

A review of Hannah Patterson’s Much at the Cock Tavern Theatre

Here’s what happens after Helen, tells her ex-boyfriend Tom, who’s still in love with her, that’s she about to get married to someone else: in fact she’s going to get married to Tom’s dad, Roy.

Helen: Are you mad?

Tom: Mad?

Helen: With me?

Tom: Would it make a difference?

PAUSE

Maybe’s it’s unfair to hold up a single line as illustrative of psychological implausibility, or indeed simple naffness, but, shucks, I’ve done it anyway. Mad? Personally I’d be completely grossed out. And I know I’m not alone on this ― I checked with my four flatmates. They all agreed; they would be totally grossed out too.

Would any of them, I asked, say ‘Would it make a difference?’ My weird flatmate (whose only relationships with women are conducted via the medium of online Dungeon and Dragons) said he might say something sulky like that, but then he doesn’t count. He’s weird and unsympathetic and crucially has never had a real girlfriend. Tom, by contrast, is meant to be at least normal, if not quite dishy.

Hannah Patterson’s first play has a fabulous premise: bringing your one night stand, from a couple of month’s back, to your dad’s wedding to your ex-girlfriend, really should offer a world tour’s worth comic mileage. Yet somehow, rather like the stream of champagne bottles opened on stage, this play lacks pop. Oedipus in Kilburn is genteel, tongue-tied and definitely not as sordid as the programme notes seemed to promise. How far would you go to get what you want? Asks the poster banner. Not very, comes the play’s apparent answer. In fact with half the cast planning to scarper to New York, it seems most people will go much further simply to avoid an argument.

This isn’t the fault of the slick production (both the music and lighting are excellent) or the very composed performances by an impressive cast. Roger Ringrose as Roy is particularly good, benefitting from perhaps the most coherent portrait and certainly many of the play’s best lines. Hannah Eidinow’s direction is also assured though the frequent stylized pauses sometimes works counter to the play’s mood, imposing a significance, and a seriousness, the dialogue rarely matches.

All of which is a pity, for though Patterson generally has a good ear, she has stumbled into any number of theatrical bear traps (discussions of art for example, with lines like ‘your work is so brave, so honest’ that instantly clobber the sincerity out of even the most sympathetic characters, alongside a few moments of inadvertent comedy ― no man, couch-bound, sulking at home in the dark, swigging Stella and listening to Radiohead has any right to expect not to get dumped. Although ‘We’re holding each other back’ is pretty good as break-up lines go. I have noted it.)

The apparent climax to the play arrives too soon; boxing in the plot and rendering the final scene, one of several flashbacks, more weightless than poignant.

Nevertheless there’s enough promise here to make this short play an interesting curiosity at this new and unpretentious fringe theatre.

Laura, 25, from Wandsworth, 5‘4’’, slender, employed in media, off mysinglefriend.com pre-date-dumped me.

‘How about changing coffee to alcohol?’ she wrote four days before the show. ‘I think it will help. Both of us.’

Well it took me a couple of days to get back to her.

‘7pm at Hammersmith?’ I asked, and waited for her reply. I signed in again on the eve of our date.

Laura has blocked you from sending mail to her.

After all that groundwork! Dumped before I even met the bitch. That’s a record. I wasn’t even stood up. I had my getting stood up opportunity – stood up. Stolen from me. I never even had the chance to be disappointed in a place that sells alcohol. I bought new volumising shampoo specially. I could take it back. I still have the receipt.

Plus I was crash dieting for five days prior. I only ate pitta bread, humous and celery.  She was the one, the only one, and now I hate her and I feel just like the way Simon Cowell should and I’m never going outside ever ever ever again. Except to buy food.

Anyway I had to take Emergency Girl to the show instead. EG was grumpy, she had a migraine. As with other activities when EG contracts a headache one changes course.

And so it came to pass that only fifteen minutes into Pub Rock we had to sidle out quietly; though I hasten to add this had little to do with the gig. I personally was almost disappointed to leave.

Pub Rock runs on the neat conceit of having a superior cover band vacuum pack into an hour and a bit everybody’s favourite Guitar Hero cheese selection. In between the songs there is some vague characterisation of the members of the band and deliberately lame jokes. These sections seemed largely incidental, and to be frank, somewhat contrived. One senses the cast has spent too much time watching Ricky Gervais and Flight of the Conchords and mugging up on how to look gormless.

Nor is this a show for teenagers. The point of rock is surely romantic rebellion: the spontaneous overflow of emotion. A lot of it might be crap but at least it’s authentic; even the pastiches are felt. Pub Rock however is all about nostalgia, the jokes are cute rather than edgy, knowing but also a bit easy. There seems to be a strangely thin line between celebration and derision and I’m not sure this keeps to the right side. It’s still likeable because there’s no doubt Cartoon de Salvo are a charming bunch as well extremely accomplished musicians. I just don’t quite feel quite old enough for it.

Meanwhile on some deeper, incommunicable level girls apparently have an allergic reaction to it.

At the interval Mental Flatmate was a bit glum. ‘There’s not enough grime,’ he complained. ‘Prison’s all about knives and gangs, you know?’ He paused and stared silently at his beer for a full minute. ‘They haven’t got enough hate.’

Mental Flatmate reads the Daily Mail and gets intimidated by the school kids who hang around the end of our street smoking and looking cold. I don’t know where MF gets his knowledge of prison from, I’m fairly sure he’s never been in one, but he carries himself like a lag. He’s been wearing the same tracksuit top for months and he has one of those thousand mile stares that makes girls on the tube get up and move.

For anyone apart from Max Mosley, Rex Obano’s first play Slaves, performed at Theatre 503 – which includes full body cavity searches, onstage masturbation, semen gargling and stories of bullying in Wandsworth prison ― isn’t precisely what you’d call a first date play. So it had seemed sensible to take MF instead, but he was definitely restless. ‘I could be at home playing Worms. There’s a Friday league.’

Something in the second half however turned him round.

‘That was good.’

‘What was good about it?’

‘Solid.’

To be fair to MF my thoughts followed a similar trajectory. After forty minutes which didn’t quite balance its mixture of shock reportage, coming of age tale and ‘meditation on human bondage’ (the direction throughout was a touch stodgy) it really started to motor. The characters’ story arcs began to bind, tension increased, the audience craned forward because they cared.

A lot of this was down to a superb cast. Lead Adetomiwa Edum did well to bring credibility and sympathy to a character whose actions and outlook often seemed to lack consistency. He has bright future, though the surest sign of his talent was evident in his ability to keep up with three actors on the top of their game. Paul Bentall playing gruff guard White, David Burt as the superbly cynical prison governor and the terrifying Cornel S. John, as an aging murderer Reuben, all clearly relished a script which at its moments was simultaneously filthy, funny and moving. And crucially knowing.

Obano has clearly done his research. He knows how drugs get into prison, understands how guards are compromised and uses prison patois with a flair and confidence few first time playwrights could match. Yet his message is bleak and perhaps surprisingly for fringe theatre, arguably conservative.

One line of thought followed through the play runs counter to our usual view of self-knowledge: that if it is not an unqualified good, it is at least consoling. Instead Obano’s prisoners and guards, trapped in uneasy alliances and denied privacy, come to see themselves only as limited, cynical, shabby. If there is a difference between guards and prisoners, it seems to be that the guards know these limitations and accordingly wall in their own fantasies in ways the prisoners can’t or won’t. Edun’s naive young officer learns by trial and error―by accumulating bruises―how to avoid deeper wounds. He learns he’s closer to his fellow white officers than the black prisoners he’s been sent to ‘connect with’.

By contrast the prisoners’ greatest collective vice is a kind of vaulting ambition: prison a deserved purgatory. Anger at the system, at racial inequality, at a country which proclaims ‘Britons never will be slaves’, even at blind circumstance― are all ‘revealed’ as displaced rage against themselves. Against their failure to take control. Punishment matters as much, if not more than rehabilitation, and the worst punishment is knowing you deserve it, and you’re too weak to change.

This is a good first play and look forward to seeing Obano’s future work.

Like Starsuckers, reviewed last week, Ondi Timoner’s We Live in Public is a confused film. It’s a documentary about ‘the most brilliant dot.com millionaire you’ve never heard of’ [actually that would probably be all of them] ― a chap called Josh Harris.

Not that even if you had heard of him, you’d necessarily have recognised the brilliant dot.com millionaire, since he seems to have spent much of his life, including many of his board-meetings, dressed as his fully made-up, alter-ego ‘Luvvy the Clown’. An unusually hideous look even for a man who during his better moments (and in this film they’re precious few) appears damply constipated.

Whether getting the jump on the market in online porn chat and cheap-as-chips MTV really marks out Harris as a media visionary, I’ll let you decide. Nevertheless he oversaw two projects which have eerie resonance with much of contemporary online culture.

The first project ― part art-installation, part monumental vanity-project ― involved locking up and catering for, about a hundred volunteers in a windowless New York apartment block, filled with cameras and televisions, which allowed the participants to snoop on one another, in any location, at any time. Harris’ prototype Big Brother in fact went rather further than any of the progressively more gruesome TV versions, by including a basement filled with automatic weapons, and a white-tiled prison cell in which theatrical interrogations were held, the tone pitched somewhere between the Stanford Prisone Experiment and a Max Mosley wet dream. Ultimately the police shut the event down though not before most of the inhabitants had gone from a short-lived orgiastic euphoria into a black hysterical mania; while Harris (who had by now sold his own business to become ‘an artist’) had burned through most of his personal fortune.

Harris’ next project was to Big Brother his own life online, by sticking cameras up throughout his flat (with a dedication that extended to a spy-cam in his toilet bowl) and streaming the resulting film online 24 hours a day. Surprisingly Harris had a girlfriend at this point; less surprisingly she soon left him ― though whether this was because of the project itself or the simple result of living with a lunatic sociopath isn’t really discussed. The most interesting aspect of the project came from what was initially one of its by-products― the couple’s online chats with their viewers. For both of them the chats became an obsession, craving sympathy from their unseen arbiters; those capable of judgment but not punishment. Or more prosaically it reminded me of watching relationships explode on Facebook.

Like a character from Evelyn Waugh, Harris is last glimpsed living in deepest Africa as far away from new technology ― and by his own admission, his creditor’s ― as Luvvy and himself could manage.

Whether Harris’ story really does suggest the future for the rest of us is a moot point. In spite of a somewhat breathless commentary, and being at least half an hour too long, Timoner’s doc is worth looking out for on DVD because, whilst it is currently showing at select art house cinemas, it’s unlikely to make a much wider appearance.

‘Starsuckers’ is the new documentary film by Chris Atkins, (Director of the Blair-baiting polemic ‘Taking Liberties’) which created a bit of a stir at the London Film Festival both by preleasing clips of tabloid journalists offering cash for trash stories about celeb boob-jobs, whilst being simultaneously sued by Max Clifford. The Guardian particularly loved the exposé of tabloid malpractice which chimed with the work of their reporter Nick Davies (who himself appears in the film).

The film is a jaunty, if uneven, investigation into the public’s, apparently insatiable, appetite for celeb gossip, alongside the media’s manipulation of this rather unsavoury diet. And it has a number hits: Clifford filmed secretly boasting about news stories he’s fabricated and covered up, examples of the seepage of ‘celebrity news values’ (or rather lack of them) into the reporting of politics, the corresponding movement of celebrities themselves into politics and a meticulously researched critique of the grossly smug Live8 concerts, which will doubtless have Bob Geldof’s apparatchiks vetting Youtube for years to come. Ultimately, however, the film’s guiding thesis, that celebrity is used by the media to control the masses, is both too obvious and too reductive to be especially interesting.

At a cinematic level it also suffers from a grating voiceover, intended to represent the media as a whole, but which seems more like a gimmick used to disguise an intrinsic lack of faith in the film’s own suppositions. Perhaps unsurprisingly this voiceover tends to vanish during the strongest sections in which ‘good old fashioned’ news reporting, truth as the voice of authority, takes over.

It’s a pity ‘Starsuckers’ is so hit and miss because as the media shifts into a digital age something fascinating is happening, not simply in the dispiriting thought that our main news sources are now PR companies and press officers rather than journalists, but in the distinction between media and the general public, and between the public figure and the private citizen.

As regards the media overall? Personally I’m with Baudrillard’s assessment (from a book first published in 1985 – no, there’s no new news)― ‘We should agree neither with those who praise the beneficial use of the media, nor with those who scream about manipulation, for the simple reason there is no relation between a system of meaning and a system of simulation’.

The net result for individuals, as he saw it, was ‘stupor; a radical uncertainty as to our own desires, our own choices, our own opinions, our own will. This is the clearest result of the whole media environment, of the information which makes demands on us from all sides and which is as good as blackmail.’

Stay tuned for The Third Estate’s exclusive interview with director Chris Atkins, coming to a computer screen near you tomorrow…

I must start with a sincere apology on behalf of what follows: indeed, when it comes to offering up reviews of the weekend’s events, I would appear that my style is more akin to that of Mark Lawrenson than Mark Lawson.   None the less, I thought I would try my hand at some theatre reviewing, having had the misfortune this weekend to sit through Complicité’s production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, currently running at the Duchess Theatre in the West End.

I think its only fair to mention at this early stage that I am not a massive fan of a lot of Beckett’s works.  And this is a great source of disappointment to me, for I really wish I could be.  I’m quite down with the whole postmodern thing in theory: there are a whole host of reasons for this, the chief one being that it enables me to wank on at dinner parties in a vein attempt to chat up women who soon after quickly realise how little money I actually have, how I only got into the room because of friends I met at university, and that I not a viable marriage option.  But it passes the time.  This play, however, sadly did not.

Originally penned in French and entitled Fin de partie, its name apparently derives from the last part of a game of chess, when only a few pieces remain in play. (The French title can be applied to games besides chess, and Beckett supposedly lamented the fact that there was no precise English equivalent.)  What follows is an agonizing 100 minutes whereby the four remaining pieces, or actors, follow each other around the stage without any sense of conclusion, like a stubborn novice who refuses to admit defeat.

Whilst this resounding lack of purpose was undoubtedly Beckett’s actual purpose in writing the play, I felt the immediate idea that characters would exist in the unchanging, static state it opens begins by neglecting the a very real essence within human experience.  Hope and relational interaction all too often serve simply as their own reward.  Thus, whilst their external conditions seem feasible and interesting, right from the very start their internal instincts did not, destroying any reflections which could have been drawn thereafter.

Nonetheless it continues.  Each day contains the actions and reactions of the day before, until each event takes on an almost ritualistic quality. It is made clear, through the text, that the characters have a past (most notably through Nagg and Nell who conjure up memories of tandem rides in the Ardennes). However, there is no indication that they may have a future. Even the death of Nell, which occurs towards the end of the play, is greeted with a lack of surprise. The isolated setting, the diseased characters, and the constant references to aspects of civilisation that no longer exist, is then followed by cataloguing of every human emotion or form of interaction which are dismissed as inherently self-serving and futile.

It is – in a word – bleak.  Stepping outside the theatre afterwards, you are met with the often neglected realisation that, actually, the apocalyptic future that was predicted by many such writers in those early Cold War years has not materialised and – by some standards at least – we are actually doing alright!  But Beckett undoubtedly hoped I’d take more from it than that.  Yet I just found it reductionist – juvenile, even.  At no point, for example, did its writing reference the fact that this was intend for production.  The poor theatre company (who can be genuinely sublime) were left trying to strain out a few laughs from never funny constructs.  I felt like the writer was simply writing against himself.  No wonder I didn’t feel welcome.

In short, had the play not been written by Beckett and were luvvies everywhere not too scared to vent comment about anything they believe they may not have possibly totally understood (read: a lot of things) I very much doubt that the play would have ever been commissioned.  Far from advocating a West End full of ‘We Will Rock You’, I would simply like to say that – on some occasions – there is some utter bollocks out there being put on by renowned theatre groups in the name of renowned writers.  Let us not be too scared to call them out, for not to do so on such occasions really would devalue their art.

In capitalism’s early life Marx compared capital to a vampire, that ‘only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’. Chris Harman thinks a different horror staple is appropriate for the system’s later years. Far from being the sophisticated, sentient vampire count, it is better compared to the mindless, destructive zombie, ’seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals and responding to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of activity that cause chaos all round’. Harman’s book is a detailed account of the history and nature of this zombie system, framing a thorough defence of the relevance of Marx to understanding the current economic crisis.

Zombie Capitalism benefits, ironically, from having been intended as a rather different book. Harman’s intention was an update of his book Explaining the Crisis, intended to defend similar conclusions and incorporate work done in articles in International Socialism over recent years. The Credit Crunch, Lehman Brothers and the onset of recession created a need to rework much of the book. This actually helps give greater background to the account of what is going on today. Rather than being a rushed out ‘Marxist guide to the credit crunch’ it is an important document in a particular tradition of Marxism, which gives a persuasive account of the events of the past two years by rooting them in wider processes in the system. In fact, only three of the fourteen chapters are taken up with a direct discussion of recent events.

Harman assumes little prior knowledge, and a good thing too as much of the debate amongst Marxists on these issues can be anything but accessible. Marx’s account of capitalist crisis, his Labour Theory of Value and the various debates around these issues are explained with clarity. Following Marx we get a picture of a system characterised by competitive accumulation, with periodic, ever deepening crises. A system which is international, but at the same time gives rise to powerful and competing nation states. A system which transforms use values into exchange values, and in so doing mystifies and distorts them, and which transforms even basic human capacities into a commodity. 

Harman identifies two key trends in the history of capitalism: Endless, rapid, competitive accumulation and, more controversially, the tendency of profit rates to fall. Marx argued that as the proportion of investment in fixed capital compared to that in Labour increased, the rate of return on investment will decrease. This is because Labour is the only source of value. Whilst this claim has been the source of much controversy Harman is not naïve about it, and he defends it with all the vigour of someone who has been an active socialist across five decades. This tendency, argues Harman, is crucial to understanding the various ups and downs of the global system over the past century and a half, and can help us understand what economists still see as the holy grail, the depressions of the 1870s and 1930s.

Whilst these tendencies help us understand the depressions, a developed analysis can also help us see how, temporarily, they were overcome. Drawing on arguments from Michael Kidron, he suggests out that investment in unproductive labour (defined as labour that does not aid capitalist accumulation) is leakage, or waste from the system. He argues that this insight can explain the so called ‘Golden Age of Capitalism’, from 1945 until the 1970s through the levels or arms investment at the time. The global system was stable because massive amounts of surplus value were invested in armaments during the Cold War, slowing the growth of fixed capital relative to Labour. This allowed the tendency to be offset for the longest period in capitalism’s history, but still crisis returned in the 70s.

And so to today. Since the recessions of the 1970s global capitalism has been hit by regular crisis, from the long drawn out collapse of the Japanese economy to the bursting of the telecoms bubble in 2001. Profit rates never returned to those before the golden age, and throughout the 1980s and 90s the solution was to try to prop up profits through shifting the burdens onto the labour force, holding down real wages and various ‘productivity improving’ techniques. During this period a system of finance developed which, as well as being essential to the management of ever greater international transactions, seemed to offer massive profits. The US’ biggest manufacturing firm, General Electric, received 40% of its revenue from its finance wing ‘GE Capital’, and would often use its assets to ensure it reported regular and steady growth. As Harman observes ‘the vast expansion of finance had created the illusion of a new “long upturn” in productive accumulation; the crisis of finance made that illusion disappear with traumatic effects.’

 Try as it might capitalism can’t escape Marx, and:

“In some important ways the system is even more chaotic than Marx’s account. The very size of the units that make it up means that it has lost some of its old flexibility. The destruction of some capitals through periodic crises which once gave new life to those that remained now threatens to pull these down as well. Life support systems provided by the state may be able to keep the system from complete collapse but cannot restore it to long-term vigour.”

Harman ends with an important call to arms. In re-affirming Marx’s belief that those capable of transforming society and ending capitalism are those who create its wealth, he adds that ‘those who study capitalism have to become an integral part of a movement of those who suffer from it’. And, as we all know, the only way to deal with a zombie is to remove the head, or destroy the brain.

Chris Harman is Editor of International Socialism and a leading member of the Socialist Workers Party. Zombie Capitalism is published by Bookmarks and is available from their website.

Chris will be speaking at the Book Launch at Bookmarks shop, 1 Bloomsbury St, Central London, on Tuesday 29th September, 6:30pm. Call 020 76371848 or email to reserve a place.