By Daniel Taghioff.

This development has brought on a wave of angst across the civilised world, as middle-class lefties realise they will have to brush up on their modes of production and dust off their anecdotes on ideology (See Thus Passim). But the thing is, none of this is difficult. So with no further fanfare, here it is:

The THUS potted guide to political economy:

Profit: If you have an unhealthily high rate of profit the money moves away from the poor to the rich. If you have a low rate of profit the rich get pissed off. 

Capitalist Crises: Too much of the former, you crush the poor – who then, incidentally, can’t buy stuff. Too much of the latter, a counter-revolution like Neo-liberalism.

An even briefer history of Neo-Liberalism: TheThatcher revolution and ’Reaganomics‘ both inspired by Milton Friedman (and Ayn Rand et al) led to redistribution of wealth, largely from the middle to the top and ‘light touch’ regulation in the financial markets. The stated objective was smaller government and an end to Keynesian supply-side economic dogma, but this didn’t happen. It all went horribly wrong (Thus passim).

Inequality: The poor got richer (in absolute terms) despite the robbery from above because there were more resources coming in from the environment.

The environment: A lack of natural resources makes inequality more of a problem (free summary), as you loose cheapo consumer goods as a way of buying off the poor, and as prices spike, especially for food… (Thus passim).

Productivity: Productivity gains or ‘advanced technology’ allegedly defeated Marxism, or rather the lumbering economic giant of Communism. But in reality, it actually dramatically increased natural resource usage. All that growth from the ‘white heat of technology’ can be accounted for as increased available energy in the economy,(Full text here) which nowadays means Big Oil.

Consumption: Productivity should really be measured in terms of goods per unit of natural resource. This is not going up anywhere near fast enough (look at page 20). To quote Monbiot (if you must- JK) “if our economy grows at 3% between now and 2030, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs.” Hence we are running out of stuff, like Oil, though there will be peak other things too, like available fresh water.

Revolution: So there will be a crunch (or several). Printing money will not buy us out of trouble if there isn’t stuff to buy (Thus passim). Developing countries, especially those with a a big exposure to food price rises such as India will not be able to hold onto democracy if basic natural resources totally deplete. Revolutions, on a small or large scale are imminent. We are in for some interesting decades (Thus Passim)…

Conclusion: This recession is a phoney war. Our kids won’t need to worry about levels of debt – which, by the way, are notional – a future dictatorship of the proletariat could abolish these by simply refusing to honour them (or just by printing money). Our kids (and their parents) need to worry about natural resources, because we can’t print more of them.

Recently, The Guardian reported police warnings of a ‘summer of hate.’ Sources of Intelligence (in short supply in the police) ‘indicate’ that middle class anger at economic turmoil will boil over into violent civil disobedience, including riots and, improbably, looting. David Cox, my favourite agent provocateur, helped set this hare racing a few weeks ago. The government, always on the lookout for a new focus of fear now that the War on Terror has been exposed as a chimaera, have been quick to agree that its them middle class troublemakers wot we orta look out for. Watch out for suspicious huddles at Yoga classes. Report your neighbour if he starts wearing a beret and buys fertiliser for the allotment- middle class people use organic methods – he’s making bombs. Allotments need more CCTV cameras, if they haven’t already got them as protection from ex-bankers, out to steal the artichokes, fennel, radiccio and rocket, subsistence fare in Islington’s salad days, now as precious as plutonium on a Jobseekers’ allowance. Vanguardistas are probably already mobilising pensioners and out-of-work estate agents using Guevera’s foco theory, inspired by the recent Che movies. Video shops should keep records of anyone who has recently rented the Baader Meinhof Complex. Che was middle class: he trained as a doctor. Those krauts were middle class. So was Karl Marx (and he wrote Das Kapital in London). Peter Kropotkin was not only middle class, his father was a farmer. You see? Impose lockdown on the allotments before it’s too late.

Today it would be called the 'Ever-So-Cross Brigade'

I would rather welcome a return to the days of The Angry Brigade – AKA the Stoke Newington Eight – our very British homegrown Baader Meinhof libertarian communist anarcho-syndicalist situationist claque. Hell of a name, brilliant logo. Their trial, one of the longest in British legal history, kept us scared for weeks. True, they were responsible for 25 bombings, of embassies, Government Ministers’ houses and the like, but in a very English way, only one person was slightly injured. Stuart Christie, one of the accused, naughtily attempted to assassinate Franco, not during the Spanish Civil War, when it was almost a gap year pastime for all good Americans and Eric Blair, but in the 1960s, when it wasn’t. Co-defendant Angela Mason was awarded an OBE in 1999. Stuart lives in Brighton, is a great publisher who deserves an OBE (for services to anarchy?) and free speech. He’s great value and a friend. (Security services take note).

It would make a novel change if the English middle classes stopped twittering about downsizing from Waitrose to Lidl (and clogging up the Aldi car parks with their Volvo estates) and turned to riot and misrule. All things being equal, the UK should join Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Greece and imminently several other countries in disorderly mass protests against the corruption, neglect and incompetence which has played a large part in Britain’s slide towards second world status. A hot summer, cheap supermarket beer, risible dole payments, no chance of a job, kids facing a hopeless future, enacted against the backdrop of an oppressive regime actively inpinging upon civil liberties misruled by an unelected gurning Scotsman displaying symptoms of paranoid delusion would tip the balance towards days of rage in most societies. But in England, I’m not so sure.

Rioting English middle class youths

The English Middle Class ethos (not necessarily its individuals) is a powerful sedative to revolution. The English are proud of their ability to somehow muddle through, make do, to be sanguine in the face of adversity; to be shat upon, in fact. Their inherent and wholly unjustified sense of superiority to the rest of the world has enabled them to watch their living standards decline while pretending that Britain (meaning England) still calls the shots on the international stage. The present government has pandered to that inertia, enacting a death of a thousand tiny cuts on civil liberties, introducing a plethora of stealth taxes and authoritarian laws while helping a repressive neo-colonial US regime steal resources and impose democracy from 35,000 feet. It would be fun to see them loot the Fromagerie, set up bogus accounts with Johnny Boden and refuse to shout weedy encouragement to British tennis players at Wimbledon. But it’s unlikely that they will throw petrol bombs at riot police. They’d get caught on CCTV camera. Anyway, they’ll be spending their severance pay bothering the natives of Cornwall, Walberswick or Tuscany.

There is a possibility of prolonged civil unrest, but by rights it should come from the (literally) lumpenproletariat, know known as the underclass, who used to make and do things when it was fashionable for economists to recognise the need for a manufacturing economy. They used to have a Labour Party, but like everything else, it was stolen by the middle classes, who in turn were duped by a Confederacy of Dunces. They now watch daytime TV and are too fat to fight.

Policeman practising polo on a woman photographer's head, Orgreave, 1984

Britain had some heady moments in the 1980s under Saint Margaret Thatcher, beloved of both Blair and Brown. Brixton, Bristol, Toxteth, Manchester and Leeds saw terrifying race riots which led to change and some great songs and poems. The 1984 miner’s strike was the last hurrah of protest at an engineered change in the balance of worker rights. It achieved little – its leaders were stupid and corrupt – but the unions had some lovely banners. The 1990 Poll Tax riots, the largest ruck in London’s history, caused the downfall of the Iron Lady. But those were different times. 2 million people took to the streets of Britain in 2003 to protest against the Iraq war. The government ignored them. I predict a lot of hot air, a lot of excuses for increased surveillance and, hopefully, a series of co-ordinated acts of civil disobedience which will emphasise the need to change the personnel in Whitehall. But middle class riots? In England? Perish the thought. It’s about as likely as a public enquiry into Weapons of Mass Destruction, MPs expenses or use of torture on detainees.

The subject matter is difficult: Bobby Sands and his IRA colleagues were guilty of heinous crimes for which they freely claimed responsibility. The dirty protest of ‘non-conforming prisoners’ started as a refusal by convicted Irish Republican Army (IRA) activists to wear the (prison) uniform of what they termed as an occupying power. The subsequent protracted acts of self-immolation were staged partly in despair at the prevailing brutality and inhumanity of the notorious H Block of Northern Ireland’s Maze prison, but also in an attempt to force the British government to afford political prisoner status to terrorists. The moral maze had no exit. Aside from self-determination and a united Ireland, which the Loyalists, UK government and, for that matter, the Republic would not countenance, the IRA’s objectives were never clearly articulated. Their brutal, psycho- and sociopathic acts of violence were matched by the tactics of the British army and Northern Ireland police. The film portrays the toxic nihilism of this death struggle without resorting to polemic. It tells us, for example, that 16 prison officers were murdered by the IRA during the course of the blanket protests: most had ideological reasons to pursue their brutal trade but they too had families. Its uncompromising depiction the endemic torture and degredation of the prisoners creates empathy, but stops short of endorsing their cause.

We don’t walk out of the cinema shouting ‘Up the IRA.’ McQueen has made an exceptional art movie about the sorrow of the human condition, not a biopic about a the world’s most celebrated hunger striker. Michael Fassbender’s magisterial portrayal of Bobby Sands has hints of messianic symbolism, and we sympathise with his plight, but we aren’t convinced by the logic of his sacrifice. We are left agape at the horror and futility of a grotesque civil war, conducted by bigoted minorities, under rules of engagement of the abattoir. The Northern Ireland Troubles were ultimately about ‘two little boys,’ but there was little chance of them sharing a wooden horse, unless it was the Trojan variety.

McQueen has framed a powerful anthem to the doomed idealism of youth. ‘Hunger’ is a valediction against ultra nationalism, told in visual verse. You can see this film at limited Odeon outlets in the UK, elsewhere in good art theatres. Don’t plan a knees-up and a slapup meal afterwards but try not to miss it.