Coming out of the Political Closet
This essay was originally published on 21 September 2021 for subscribers to our newsletter.
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THE BERLUSCONI BONUS
by Allan Cameron
All deliveries free of charge in the UK
Pages: 208
ISBN: 978-0-956056-09-2
Dimensions: 210 x 140 x 10 mm
Publication: 13 August 2010
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Some time ago a colleague of mine who, amongst other things, was in control of the social media told me not to post or tweet about political things, as I was wont to do. Her instruction was well-intentioned and probably correct, as I certainly believed at the time. So I stopped. This is a publishing house, and its job is to publish books and promote them.
Going further back in time – before the birth of Vagabond Voices – Luath Press published my novel entitled The Berlusconi Bonus, which is a political satire, whose most radical statement was “Perhaps a society that ensured that everyone was above a certain threshold of poverty and below a certain threshold of wealth would not be such a bad idea after all.” Not that radical, and this too seems very appropriate, because a novel is not a political pamphlet setting out a new world; it is generally a means to make readers re-examine their certainties. Though in 2005 and before the financial crash it was radical in that it challenged the widely held view that capitalism had “won” (it was unclear whether this was a victory over the Soviet Union or the laws of economics). I don’t think that either my abstaining from social media or my satirising contemporary society as it is, rather imagining a better world, amounted to self-censorship – that insidious response to conformism which could also be perceived as a sensible form of self-protection which often produces better artistic results. In any event The Berlusconi Bonus produced quite a reaction and the reviews were mostly good. The New Internationalist liked it a lot and said that “it is very funny”, whilst “It is never funny” was the judgement of the similarly titled New Humanist, which considered it to be “a novel of ideas. Bad ideas” with certain “Uncle-Jo apologist” associations.
The title derived from what I would only define as a mildly funny joke about legislation in a future dystopic England that gave the right to those who held more than a given amount of assets to register for the Plutocratic Social Gratitude Award, which would provide them with impunity to break the laws of the land, and was immediately renamed by the tabloids “after some European prime minister who lived when there was history.” Dario Fo, who I briefly met at the Edinburgh Book Festival, said that he would like to use the quip, but I doubt that he was being anything more than polite – in precisely that ebullient and incredibly charming manner which is familiar to anyone who has seen him in action on stage or TV. It showed however that as an Italian, he was putting his detested prime minister at the centre of a book that was actually an attack on Fukuyama and other neoliberals. This now seems a long time ago, which is confirmed by the fact that I thought that 1.2 billion dollars could define someone as the super-rich (it’s still an unimaginable amount of money if owned by a single person, but I have the feeling that it may be close to what Bezos makes in a month).
In Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, anyone who raised questions about the treatment of the working class and dispossessed farmers was dismissed as a communist, when patently they weren’t. “Communist” is used as insult, and that is the first point I want to make in this essay. Often it is best in such circumstances just to say, “I’m a communist,” and then there’s little more to be said. In my collection of essays and aphorisms, Things Written Randomly in Doubt, this is exactly what I did. Leaving aside whether it was another act of cowardice to hide the admission in a collection of essays, the argument I’m making is not about whether I’m a communist, a social-democrat or a conservative. The question is should we be concealing our true opinions and allowing only handful of what might be called authorised dissidents to provide a semblance of debate. Should publishers, impresarios, funders and other people making decisions in the arts reserve their judgements just because they have to when making professional judgements. Paradoxically Vagabond Voices has published many anti-Soviet novels, some fiercely so and some more nuanced (to be precise: three of the former and four of the latter). This wasn’t planned because publishers publish whatever works of quality come their way, and as Anne Marie Métailié, the founder of the highly successful French publishing house that carries her surname, has said, “Publishing is a melancholic profession that almost always ends [up] as an imperfect business.” I am well aware of our imperfections although I feel that perhaps that awareness does help to at least partially mitigate them. But should publishers who are, as she suggests, constrained by economics, also remain silent, even when so much has been delegitimised and so much is misunderstood?
There are many communisms, just as there are many interpretations of the words “liberalism” and “social-democracy”, both over time and at the same time. A friend said that I couldn’t be a communist because I had never been a member of a party sanctioned by Moscow, as he had been. Fair enough, that’s one definition, and perhaps a valid one, but the word is much older than the Bolsheviks, who were originally the majority of a Social-Democratic party, a recent term coined by Marx and Engels (Andrew Graham-Dixon claimed that Gustaf V of Sweden was in the habit of giving into the social-democratic politics of painters and writers because he found them better company than Europe’s dull royal families, and I like this idea because, if true, nothing could demonstrate better the random nature of history, whilst after the Second World War the German Social-Democrats were told by the Anglo-Americans that they had to drop Marx if they wanted to be a legal party, just as the Soviets were remodelling the same party in a different direction on the other side of what would become a wall – both examples of just how predictable history can also be). Even Moscow-centric communism came in all shapes and sizes. The meaning we usually associated with “communism” does derive from Marx and the various splinters which Marxism was subject to, and in many cases the words “socialism” and “communism” are synonyms. However, my communism derives principally from Tolstoy, who like me was a pacifist, and Marx came later (his analysis was stunning and depressingly reliable, but he still retained the prejudices of a nineteenth-century bourgeois against minority peoples). When I was young, I admired Tolstoy for his beliefs and his influence on Gandhi, but I thought his “back-to-the-land” policies to be impractical utopian nostalgia. Today I’m not so sure, or perhaps I should say that I’m not that sure about anything. I think that we have to create a very different relationship with the land, which doesn’t involve personal ownership, and some kind of compromise between his ideas which obviously belonged to the late nineteenth century and his holistic belief of how man and the environment have to live together in an educated society is surely worthy of serious examination. The barrier was my almost religious belief in progress so typical of the sixties, which I grew out of some time ago. Western economics are destroying society and the planet, and our relationship with property and wealth and the moral dislocation it causes are the root of the problem – the solution is a more difficult thing.
You may be sceptical about that statement, so let me quote a much more reliable source, Jeffrey Sachs who designed the “shock therapy” for the former Soviet Union and would have starved many of them to death had it not been for massive aid from Germany in the late nineties:
“Look, I meet a lot of these people on Wall Street on a regular basis right now. … These are people I lunch with. And I am going to put it very bluntly: I regard the moral environment as pathological. [These people] have no responsibility to pay taxes; they have no responsibility to their clients; they have no responsibility to counterparties in transactions. They are tough, greedy, aggressive, and feel absolutely out of control in quite a literal sense, and they have gamed the system to a remarkable extent. They genuinely believe they have a God-given right to take as much money as they possibly can in any way that they can get it, legal or otherwise” (taken from David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, p. 13).
“These people”, as he loosely defines them, are not all of what capitalism is, any more than all communists are Stalinists as so many suggest, but they are typical of the neo-liberal capitalism which still clings on in spite of the mass poverty it has introduced both in the West and even more brutally in the Third World. What I am arguing for in this newsletter is not in favour of communism, but rather for communism to be seen as a perfectly valid argument whose opponents should cease to dismiss with smears and misrepresentations. Not only communism. I have mentioned Tolstoy, who was heavily influenced by Victor Hugo and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and therefore associated with socialism and anarchism. All these terms are very imprecise, as I have already suggested, and the way they vary and overlap with each other have to be learnt, before we can have an informed debate. Perhaps the only precise term I’ve used here is “pacifist”, because it is circumscribed to one specific question: whether violence and war can be justified (it can be divided into legal pacifism, moral pacifism and personal pacifism, but these sub-divisions are also clear-cut). The bluster of Fukuyama’s victory song, The End of History and the Last Man, which I satirised in The Berlusconi Bonus, can no longer be taken seriously and that is widely recognised, but we have gone little further than vague references to “anti-capitalism”.
Labels, not only on the left, are also a matter of personal histories. My politics are not that different from those of someone like George Monbiot, but the route by which we came to them is very different. I personally think of those who suffered and died in the name of that credo: two million Indonesians, although the Americans and Australians claim that it was “only” half a million (still a huge figure, but one Madeleine Albright also considered acceptable in the case children killed “to keep Saddam Hussein in his place”), or the organisers of the land battles in Sicily who were murdered by the bandit Giuliano, who was often romanticised by British intellectuals, though his death was no doubt ordered by the same people that hired him to do their dirty work with the connivance of the Italian state. These are only a tiny part of the dead, but they still deserve to be remembered. And yet they won’t be, and the world will move on and possibly invent something similar with another name. Would that matter? Possibly not, just as long as communism’s mistakes are remembered. That is the other side of the coin. One of the most important things I was trying to say in The Berlusconi Bonus was that if neo-liberalism wasn’t reigned in, there would eventually be a revolution and because revolutions have to change things too quickly, there would also be a return to Stalinism or at least some kind of despotic state. This is not only true of left-wing revolutions: the return of nineteenth-century laissez-faire policies from the 1980s onwards was another case of not learning from history.
The Italian translation of my book had a better title: 2048: Berlusconi Bonus, because that is the date in which the story unfolds, but the manuscript (a confession written following torture) is discovered in an archive following a left-wing revolution in 2084 which ushers in another brutal and rigid society (note the Orwellian dates). The “message”, which is not explicit and doesn’t appear to have been noticed, could be summed up by the idea that if we don’t have open debates about the kind of society we want and how we are going to get there, then we will be condemned to swing from one extreme to the other in an atmosphere of perennial fanaticism and hatred.
Allan Cameron, Glasgow, September 2021
The Berlusconi Bonus was republished by Vagabond Voices. Unfortunately it was during the period of the “ugly covers” (the ones I designed), but I carried through some changes that I’d made when editing the Italian translation. I cannot judge my own work, but I will provide some of the reviews:
“The Berlusconi Bonus is an adroit and satisfying satire on the iniquities of present-day life, from inane consumerism to political mendacity, globalization to the War on Terror. It is both very funny and an extremely astute analysis of the evil results of a philosophy which sings the victory song of extreme free-market economics." — Peter Whittaker, New Internationalist Magazine
“A profound, intelligent novel that asks serious, adult questions about what it means to be alive.” — Martin Tierney, The Herald
“I say buy it. It makes you think.” — Dominic Hilton, The New Humanist
“Cameron grapples with Fukuyama's theories on the end of the totalitarian ideologies and a plausible future scenario in which ‘all Muslims were either massacred or expelled from the Federation’ and there are ‘no tradesmen now, and there are no artists, musicians or writers.’” — La Stampa