Three New Reads: February

Philip Roddis

This month brings that rarest of occurrences. I’m recommending a Guardian piece: a tour of the mind of Jeff Bezos. You wouldn’t want to live there but I promise a rewarding trip.

Also, and for your instant erudition, we have Pepe Escobar on why DC is so antsy about whose gas Germany cooks with.

And to round it off nicely, Media Lens gives us the curated results of twenty years of politely framed enquiries to, and less than polite responses from, those workers on the front line of opinion manufacture we sometimes call journalists. If you struggle with the meaning of that term, you may find it helpful to keep in mind that they do what Julian Assange doesn’t.

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‘A Managerial Mephistopheles’: inside the mind of Jeff Bezos (6401 words)

In the ’70s I was co-founder of a five-strong wholefood co-op in a well to do Sheffield suburb. Young and dependent-free, we worked and played hard: paying ourselves a pittance to shave margins for affluent customers. We didn’t like capitalism, some of us less than others, but nor did we know the first thing about it. We supposed profits came from exploiting the customer.

By the early ’80s I’d been exposed to Marxism by a Maoist academic and, by the late ’80s, had read two volumes of Capital, some in a readers’ group led by a Trot, most alone. I learned that while capitalists can and do exploit consumers where conditions and the longer view allow it, year in/year out profits cannot be so explained.

To cut a long and highly dialectical story short, capitalism does not depend on ‘ripping off’ the customer. Rather, it depends on a systematic exploitation – normally hidden from exploiter and exploited alike [1] – of the unique capacity of human labour-power to create exchange values greater than its own.

Fast forward a few decades to the meteoric rise of Amazon. Has any company in history taken better care of so vast a customer base? And has any company, in the West at least, exemplified more perfectly the spirit of capitalism in its exploitation of a ruthlessly casualised workforce?

It’s rare for me to recommend, without irony or antipathy, a Guardian piece. In the past six years I recall doing so only once. Yet here I am recommending a Guardian Long Read from the start of this month. Inside the mind of Jeff Bezos, though showing a theoretical grasp no more advanced than mine had been while packing brown rice and Turkish figs for the well heeled of southwest Sheffield, features author Mark O’Connell in a fascinatingly close encounter with the cold heart and mortgaged soul of capitalism itself.

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Russia holds the key to German sovereignty (1531 words)

Pepe Escobar should – but doesn’t! – pay me for the number of times I plug his articles. Here I go again. I’ll keep this brief since I already gave a sneak preview in my recent post, Europe’s growing dilemma.

Here’s the Brazilian journalist doing yet again what he does best – diving below the idealist rhetoric of Western demonisation to dissect the realpolitik of East-West relations. While most of Pepe’s pieces centre on the action further south and east, here he has his sights on the chilly north by northwest. On the flow of Nord Stream 2, in fact.

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20 years of Media Lens: a selection of remarkable replies from journalists (4987 words)

There’s a reason, of course, for my naivety as a young man re the nature of capitalism. A reason too why otherwise intelligent people – instead of looking under the bonnet as Marx did, and as journalists like Pepe Escobar still do – take at face value demonisations of nations and leaders standing in the way of Western profits.

(When lockdown finally ends, try striking up a pub conversation about Nord Stream 2. Then try Navalny or the Skripals. See which topic falls flat, which one gets everybody piling in with beery sagacity on Putin devilry and the finer points of ‘chokicide.)

The reason for the first is our entrancement by the surface appearance of things: nicely captured in this case by the catch-phrase, ‘a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work’. The reason for the second is an evidence-defiant but all embracing understanding, its grip on the Western psyche at once soft and unrelenting, that ‘we are the good guys’.

Behind both lie the intricate networks of meaning some call The Matrix. Others prefer an older but much misunderstood term, ideology. We all of us do our bit, as workers in education and entertainment for instance, or simply as ordinary folk trying to get by – parents, say, wanting to do right by and for our kids – to perpetuate and renew those networks of meaning.

And here’s the thing: since the ruling ideas of any age are the ideas of its ruling class[2], few people speak of ideology or a ‘matrix’. They speak instead of common sense.

In sum, ideology is the way we make sense of our lives. As such its agent is Everyman. But one agency is singled out repeatedly in my writings, and those of Caitlin Johnstone, Jonathan Cook, Off-Guardian, Media Lens and others. I speak of our news media.

For reasons best articulated by Noam Chomsky[3], our media deceive us deeply but – here’s the best bit – do so in the main through subjectively honest journalists and editors. There are important exceptions of course, and grounds for saying their star is rising, but in the main these are men and women who do not set out to deceive us. Media corruption is systemic rather than conspired.[4]

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. But while sharing my understanding, and Chomsky’s, of why the media operate as they do, the Media Lens team has spent two decades politely taking individual journalists, many of them household names, to task over what they write and say. For a bigger perspective on their work, I recommend their book Propaganda Blitz, reviewed here.

Meanwhile this month’s third read gives the view from the trenches. And a revelatory view it is too. However low your opinion of journalists, I doubt you’ll be prepared for the sheer puerility of Graun cartoonist Martin Rowson…

‘[Media Lens] has succeeded in riling me. Well done. If I’m proved worng [sic] I’ll apologise. Meanwhile, fuck off & annoy someone else… No time for this anymore. Sorry. I stand convicted as a cunt. End of …’

…or the Beeb’s Gavin Esler to one he suspected of writing at Media Lens behest. (Like a good many journalists he’d stopped responding to questions, put by the ML team, whose legitimacy of substance and courtesy of tone you may judge for yourself.)

Said Esler:

Sorry but this medialens inspired stuff is very sophomoric. The last time I remember a robotic response from people like this was watching film of the nuremberg rallies. I always wondered why people marched to another’s beat without any obvious thought from themselves. Perhaps you know the answer, or perhaps you merely intend to keep marching.

Please don’t write to me again in someone else’s words. It is so embarrasing [sic] for you. Please learn to think for yourself.

But while this piece is entertaining at the level of human interest, don’t forget – not that Media Lens will let you – that these private purveyors of Prep School prickliness are also very public promoters, useful idiots beneath a greater or lesser veneer of critical detachment[5] of a status quo which trashes the planet for profit, and shepherds us down the road to Armageddon.