What does it mean to oppose warmongering? Realists like the photographer and teacher Fred Lonidier think the opportunism that leads to war cannot be opposed merely by showing its devastating consequences. He is right. We have to look beyond the spectacle of destruction or, in other words, the ‘shock and awe’ which is now a fully-fledged part of military strategy. We must consider the history and nature of the civil peace. The very opposite of civil war, this peace is still a socio-economic and political state of affairs largely imposed on society from above. Hence the old fashioned, but still legally binding, term we have taken as our title.

To this day, in a tenuously United Kingdom, if the Crown admits it has failed in its duty to maintain society’s internal peace it must bear the costs. Insurers are not willing to provide the cover. Among other things this legal nicety meant that reading riot acts could be a costly admission for the public purse and so this formal signal of civil unrest has fallen out of use. In The Civilizing Process, the historical sociologist and refugee from Nazi Germany, Norbert Elias (1897-1990), charts the way modern statecraft came about through the elite control of the internal peace, reaching down to the norms of ‘civilized’ behaviour and the development of a polite culture. Relative peace at home was the pay-off for the recognition of new and socially complex inter-dependencies. ‘Social contracts’ between rulers and ruled were intended to promote this civil peace.

Yet from medieval times on, this process of domestic pacification gave the modern nation-state and ‘civilization’ itself an increasingly Janus face. In many parts of the world people have benefited from a decrease in the sort of noble feuding which, for example, turned into England’s War of the Roses (1455-1487). But this internal pacification has gone hand in hand with an increased permissiveness and lack of restraint when it comes to the use of violence against external enemies. Over time historians and political theorists like Elias have observed that governments, elected and unelected alike, in monarchies and republics, have periodically sought to establish internal order and relative unity by pursuing war against foreign foes.

Although going to war has often been used rather blatantly to suppress divisions and whip up a sufficient degree of consensus for the order of things, warmongering is certainly easier to perceive from the outside, or from academic standpoints of relative disinterest, than from within. From the inside war is always an emergency of one kind or another and events – both real and manufactured – call for executive decisions. As the slogan ‘support our troops or shut your mouth’ on a pro-war placard makes all too clear, leadership takes precedence over public debate [see Fig. 1]. Few of the politicians responsible for the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 want to be associated with that war now. Year on year the death toll arising from their lack of restraint against an external enemy grows. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was one of the more obvious examples of an oppressive civil peace yet it was successfully turned into a profitable civil war for some. It is these compounded layers of political

meaning and economic significance which have called for a new kind of realism assembled through images and text rich in critical analysis. This demand was first articulated by the international workers’ movement and made accessible in publications like the AIZ in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. The magazine Workers Illustrated News emulated this approach in Britain, as did many others elsewhere in the world [see Fig. 2]. It is no accident that this articulation of realism came about after the First World War.

Unlike the naturalism or ‘naïve realism’ of the 19th century which gazed at the lives of poor or humble, the realism of the workers’ movement in the 1920s and 30s hinged on two key ideas. First, that a sequence of pictures and words could show how certain social phenomena, unrelated in bourgeois culture, were in fact deeply connected when seen through the prism of class consciousness. Party politics and affiliations were less important than

seeing things from working class point of view, it was argued. Second, that in representing social relations as a product of the economic system, the broad public could not only see its own position as a class, but imagine new egalitarian inter-dependencies freed from the power of the ruling classes and from their conflicts.

Consciously or unconsciously much of what we may recognise as realism today, in photo-essays and films about what people do to one another, is indebted to the anti-naturalism of the workers’ movement. However, even if they accept the label or the historical debt, few of today’s realists would be comforted by Franz Hölerring remarks to the German worker-photographers in 1928; ‘don’t let yourself be misled into playful trifles which some try to play up by falsely alleging you are an artist of great dimensions – which in fact you are not. You are a worker. Be proud of it.’

What sort of realism and social practice is produced by the entrepreneurial mentality and the ‘artistic critique of capitalism’ today is no moot point. The question goes to the very heart of how we evaluate civilisation. Asked what he thought about Western civilisation Mohandas ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi (1869-1948) famously responded that ‘it would be a good idea’. The self-serving idea of civilisation critically examined by scholars like Norbert Elias and targeted by Gandhi, went hand in hand with the spread of ideas garnered from the European Renaissance about art as an arena of political autonomy rather than dependency. The actual history of inter-dependency, forged through public and private patronage as well as artistic ambition are long-standing issues which we will not fully capture here. However, it is worth stressing that the separation of art and society into separate categories of thought and being is an invention of European discourse and a key to the spread of modern Western ideas of civilisation.

‘What I always told my students about war photography is that the last place to go is the battlefield.’ Fred Lonidier

‘Don’t let yourself be misled into playful trifles which some try to play up by falsely alleging you are an artist of great dimensions – which in

fact you are not. You are a worker. Be proud of it.’ Franz Hölerring

[Fig. 2] Page from Workers Illustrated News, December 1929.

Courtesy of Gallacher Memorial Library, Glasgow Caledonian

University Research Collection.

[Fig. 1] Owen Logan, Pro-war and Anti-war Demonstrators, Aberdeen (2003) Courtesy of the photographer

In the 18th and 19th centuries aesthetics became an alternative expression of radical consciousness, truthfulness and, ultimately, a substitute for religion. A parallel universe was created which could be judged by certain unconventional or Bohemian aesthetic standards. A mutual respect developed and some

unlikely artistic figures became icons of the political establishment. Aesthetic achievements were often used to promote the belief that the material culture produced by free-thinking artists and writers was also evidence of a superior civilisation destined to hold sway over the globe, using violence if necessary. Before becoming Britain’s great wartime defender, Winston Churchill (1974-1965) thought British parliamentarians were far too ‘squeamish’ when it came to the use of poisoned gas against ‘uncivilised’ tribes. Bolshivick villages in Russia were targets for British gas attacks in 1919.

We may well ask what it means to follow in the footsteps of pacifists like Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jnr. (1929-1968). Both were strategic pacifists. They opposed violence because they believed non-violence worked better. Both were assassinated at great cost to the causes they led. The violence that is seen in every episode of history that involves the moral reordering of society is never far from the surface of the civil peace. As the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) said: ‘when there are people who reveal through their every word and action that property is more important to them than life, truth, beauty, justice, wisdom, or democracy – the only appropriate moral response is to break their windows.’ The suffragettes were ‘guerrillists’, according to Pankhurst and were warranted to use all the methods of war stopping short of taking human life.

Realism is one of the ways that people have tried to bridge the division between art and society and

repair fractured notions of civilisation. At the most straightforward level realists have tried to critically reconnect images and words. A range of the results are exemplified by different projects in this exhibition. They include: The Greatest Show on Earth: A Photographic Story of Man’s Struggle for Wealth (1938) by S.A.

Spencer (pseudonym) and Leslie Beaton, in support of the New Deal policies in the United States; and Un Paese, Portrait of an Italian Village (1955) by Paul Strand (1890-1976) and Cesar Zavattini (1902-1989) [see Fig. 3], who offer an ethnographic microcosm of Italy’s post Second World War political economy. Like the more recent works on show these are word-laden projects only by modern standards, certainly not by medieval ones [see Fig. 4]. The almost total disconnection of images and words which lies behind the phrase “no caption needed” is often thought to apply to the greatest pictures of human suffering in today’s world. However, this is not simply a benign expression of the arrival of a universal v isual imaginat ion made p ossible by mo dern communications. It also reflects various attempts to homogenise and industrialise the production of photo-essays which can be produced and consumed with the minimum amount of critical understanding. By presenting pages from the Workers Illustrated News as evidence of working class self-representation in the inter-war period of the 20th century alongside various expressions of realism up to the present time, we offer our audience food for thought in this regard.

The borderline between the sophistication of realism in images and the artistic mannerism that plays a crucial role in the homogenisation and industrialisation of reportage and documentary work is an uncertain one. It may be easier to mark out in relation to the sort of humanist work not included in this exhibition. World famous photographers like Don McCullin or Sebastio

Salgado succeeded in making a certain ‘gritty realist’ style both more marketable and more widely emulated than the issues of realist analysis and content or its production and consumption. But it would be disingenuous to pretend that the works we do present here are unaffected by the mixed blessings of capitalism and the trials and tribulations of the organised working class as the main countervailing force against the economic system. By definition capitalism is an economic system which gives power to capitalists and, as some photographers admit, this power not only has direct impacts on image-making, but has more subtle effects too.

TH E E N D O F A M O RALLY N E UTRAL A F FA I R

For most of history war has been a morally neutral way of settling disputes over territory and power. In this sense the wars of the old feudal system in Europe were rather like duels between gentlemen who did not wish to discuss their differences at great length. More than any other single figure Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) challenged these aristocratic mores which are still expressed in the sentiment: my-country-right-or-wrong. The Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) in Europe were won and lost on the basis of territorial control but they were also self-declared ideological wars fought out between the Enlightenment values of the French Revolution and the god-appointed rulers of the ancien régime. The historical irony is that such pivotal conflicts occurred after Napoleon announced that the French republic born from the Revolution was politically and morally defunct. This was used as a justification for the coup d’état he helped orchestrate 1799 and he declared himself Emperor of the French in 1804. According to Karl Marx (1818-1883), the failures of the class struggle in France created circumstances ‘that made it possible for a grotesque mediocrity to play a hero’s part.’ Napoleon may still be seen in these withering terms but, on its own, Marx’s condemnation risks belittling Napoleon’s role in creating a type of public consciousness which became a new weapon of war. The will to win was something the old aristocratic order could not purchase from the mercenary armies and the press-ganged peasantry recruited to their cause.

‘When there are people who reveal through their every word and action that property is more important to them than life, truth,

beauty, justice, wisdom, or democracy – the only appropriate moral response is to break their windows.’ Emmeline Pankhurst

[Fig. 3] Paul Strand, The Family, Luzzara, Italy (1953) © Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive

[Fig. 4] Anon, The Martyrdoms of the reign of Mary I (detail) (1555).

An anti-Papal satire directed against Stephen Gardener, the Bishop

of Winchester. Mary’s Bishops appear as wolves, dead lambs

symbolise Protestant martyrs of the time. Before the advent of

photography text was often integrated within the image.

Napoleon understood the lack of legitimacy on the part of the ancien régime and exploited it ruthlessly. France’s fatal defeats in Spain and Russia appear as exceptions partly because they were societies so backward and inclined towards the rule of kings that they were largely immune to the subversive ideas of the European Enlightenment. In Spain especially guerrillas rallied to known rulers and their political codes.

Napoleon’s ultimate defeat and capture at the hands of the alliance of European powers defending the old order ushered in the era of Pax Britannica (the type of peace – or pacification – imposed through the largely unchallenged military dominance of the British Empire). Nevertheless the philosophy of modern war was thereafter forced to integrate Napoleonic logic. Thus, undermining an enemy’s capacity to fight involves a struggle to win over “hearts and minds” to certain codes of civilization, regardless of their actual status and practice either at home or in the conduct of war abroad. Napoleon avowedly fought for human emancipation whilst cancelling the French Revolution’s commitments to it, going so far as to re-legitimate slavery in some of France’s dominions. The military and economic rise of the United States after 1945 to the status of main arbiter of democracy and world security – Pax Americana – is marked by the same double standards concerning freedom and democracy. From Argentina to Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) the list of dictatorships and military takeovers supported by the US is a long and tragic one. Interventions in Latin America included support for dictator General Juan Carlos Onganía who came to power in Argentina via a coup in 1966 and

ruled until 1970. Close ties between the two countries not only helped to train and arm the coup plotters, they also ensured that the US was given advance warning. Onganía’s speedy dismantling of democratic infrastructures included repressive press censorship: “If a free press would make it possible for Communists to take over Argentina,” he stated, “then I would be proud to say that there is no free press in Argentina.” Thoroughly integrated into the US Cold War alliance, Onganía championed anticommunism, moving well

beyond military dominance to implement a type of ‘national security’ which involved extensive social, cultural and economic control. President Richard Nixon described him as “one of the best leaders I have known.” The 1968 Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Burns) project by the Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia (Group of Avant-Garde Artists) was a collectively realised response to the dictatorship’s repressive rule and the imposition of catastrophic neoliberal economic policies. Artists, union members, sociologists, economists, students, filmmakers and photographers came together to document and publicise the deplorable social conditions in Tucumán, a province located in the North of the country, impoverished despite its wealth and established sugar production industry. Operating in a context of civil uprising and in connection with workers’ struggles, the group explicitly rejected the traditional sites of culture as ‘useless’ and instead aimed to set up an alternative information

circuit to counter official state propaganda. Theirs was a reaction against the realities of the ‘stability’ required by the US and the civil peace imposed by Onganía.

The same political and moral hypocrisy was targeted by Philip Jones Griffiths (1936-2008) in his 1971 book Vietnam Inc. through the critical sequencing of images and words. Unlike many of his colleagues in the Magnum photographers agency, Griffiths resisted the fashion for gallery-style photography and adhered

to the more journalistic photo-essay form. However Griffiths also goes beyond journalistic norms of the period. Using extended captions he shows us that what we see in photograph may be very deceptive and that the context is quite literally everything. In one of his pictures a US soldier looks benignly at a Vietnamese woman cradling a small child in a village [see Fig. 5]. Yet the Madonna and child symbolism and the semblance of relative peace and equanimity conveyed by the scene is betrayed by the caption. Griffiths tells us that the woman’s village is soon to be destroyed by an aerial attack called in by the soldiers’ unit. On reading this caption not only does the soldier’s gaze seem to border on the psychopathic, but his look of interest becomes an indictment against our consumption of images as an alternative means of understanding and witnessing what happens in the world. A picture is not worth a thousand words and indeed explaining the content of an image for

Governments have periodically sought to establish internal order and relative unity by pursuing war against foreign foes.

[Fig. 5] Philip Jones Griffiths, from the book Vietnam Inc. (1971) Courtesy of Magnum Photos and Phaidon. Jones Griffiths’ caption reads: ‘MOTHER AND CHILD, shortly before being killed. A unit of

Americal Division operating in Quang Ngai Province six months before My Lai. The resentment was already there: this woman’s husband, together with the other men left in the village, had been killed a few

moments earlier because he was hiding in a tunnel. After blowing up all tunnels and bunkers where people could take refuge, GIs withdrew and called in artillery fire on the defenceless inhabitants.’

ourselves or others can take up many thousands of words. Pictures can begin discussions; they never end them.

Notwithstanding its occasional utterance, my-country-right-or-wrong is an unpopular sentiment. A conflict over territory or resources with no moral or ideological justification, no matter how thin, is virtually inconceivable. Invaders, partisans and foreign supporters in a civil war situation all proclaim noble and humanitarian causes. In this sense a state of war is a heightened state of discourse; or, in other words, language in action. Whether coming from within or without, the first targets of regime change in a modern nation are no longer the economic centres or the symbolic sites and institutions of political

power, but media and communications. Almost everything else can take second place to the mastery of public relations. The technological development of warfare and the increased dependency of information technology and computerised systems seen amounting to a ‘revolution in military affairs’ will only heighten the importance of ideology. Therefore there is much at stake in the capacity of realists to tackle war as a whole political, economic and ideological state of affairs. It is an essential task in any democracy which deserves the name.

This task is taken up by film makers like Eugene Jarecki, director of the 2005 documentary Why We Fight. Jarecki explores the political and cultural naturalisation of the ‘military-industrial complex’ which the US President Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) warned was a danger to the country’s democracy when he left office in 1961. Throughout his film Jarecki asks a range of Americans why the United States is continually at war. His film gradually reveals the uncertainty and moral ambiguity of ready-made opinions and points to the economic manufacturing of an aggressive political consensus

partly through the geographical distribution of jobs in the defence industries. Another film worth mentioning here which operates in the same dialogical tradition is Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity released in 1969. It concerns France’s relative passivity and capitulation to the Nazis during the Second World War – a political and moral accommodation with genocide that was glossed over after the fall of the collaborationist Vichy government in 1944. Ophuls’ film brings out the class character of France’s capitulation to the Nazis. Pierre Mendès France (1907-1982) was a minister in the 1936-1937 Popular Front government of Léon Blum (1872-1950) and Prime Minister of France from 1954–1955. Interviewed by Ophuls, Mendès France recalls that ‘preferring Hitler to Léon Blum was an attitude that had become very popular

in bourgeois circles’ in the France of the 1930s. Such divided loyalties may be harder to perceive in a world no longer occupied, as it was during the Cold War, by two political camps starkly divided on the socio-economic meaning of equality. Since then, rhetoric coming from the United States attempts to resurrect a similarly imposing justification – by conjuring up a ‘clash of civilisations’ and ‘the war on terror’ – and has been widely criticised for its warmongering intentions. But the underlying and recurring idea that replaces class analysis is the Hobbesian one that war is the natural state of affairs. By exposing the ideological fabrication of conflict, by revealing the underlying class interests both in victory and defeat, realist photo-essays and film show us this is not the case. The differences between photography and film are a perennial topic of discussion. But the similarities between the two media seem to outweigh the differences when it comes to realism as a challenge to this notion of war as natural and therefore to any compliant public discourse which attempts to bring about a natural political unity. Realism can tell us this unity never really exists.

T h e f o u n d a t i o n a l i d e o l o g y o f U n i t e d S t a t e s expansionism, the dogma of the nation’s ‘Manifest Destiny’, still informs visions of a new world order spearheaded by the world’s ultimate guarantor of private property rights, the United States itself. As Edward Said (1935-2003), the Palestinian scholar who lived in exile in the United States pointed out, there is no longer a movement like the American Anti-Imperialist League founded in 1898 to oppose US expansionism. The league recruited diverse supporters and benefactors including the writer Mark Twain (1835-1910), the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) and labour leader Samuel Gompers (1850-1924). In the absence of such a broad based opposition, anti-imperialism in the US today is, according to Said, far too dependent on individual dissenters. Suggesting that this is a weakness, partly because imperialism also hinges on individuals, Said says it carries on through their self-advancement in ‘the marketplace of ideas.’

The trading of oil and other major commodities in US dollars is one such idea. The petrodollar settlement which emerged in the 1970s after the US abandoned the gold standard gave the country a flexibility and power in financial matters far in excess of its productivity and trade. In the photo-essay Masquerade: Michael Jackson Alive in Nigeria, Owen Logan and Uzor Maxim Uzoatu satirise the neo-colonial politics of Nigeria, a major oil producing country fashioned by a combination of British rule in the past and US dominance in the present [see Fig. 6]. Both have lent support to feudalism in Nigeria and received support in return. Although anti-imperialism remains an important component of Nigerian labour movement, the opposition to Nigeria’s subservience and lack of sovereignty (especially when it comes to the control of the nation’s natural resources) is usually visualised according to the humanitarian mores of the international aid community. Among other things this downplays the real social complexity of a nation still stitched together by the imperial imagination. Above all, Masquerade is a realist experiment using a mixture of straight photographs, photomontages and text, designed to escape the humanitarian marketplace of political goals and organisational ideas which look good only from a distance. Under those influences which belittle class politics and self-organisation, and,

A picture is not worth a thousand words and indeed explaining the content of an image for ourselves or others can take up many thousands of words. Pictures can begin discussions;

they never end them.

[Fig. 6] Owen Logan, The National Anthem Band, from the series Masquerade: Michael Jackson Alive in Nigeria (2001-2005) Courtesy of the photographer

as the memory of Nigeria’s civil war from 1967 to 1970 fades, the country regularly appears to be on the brink of another one.

The anti-imperialist malaise Said pinpoints in the United States can also be detected in Martha Rosler’s photo-montages House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series (2004-2008) [see Fig. 7]. These works renew an earlier project in which she spliced together images of imperial violence in Vietnam with domestic scenes taken from the pages of lifestyle magazines. The resulting images were distributed via the pages of Women’s Movement grass-roots publications and as photocopies at demonstrations. This time the subject is the invasion of Iraq. Again she uses vernacular ‘pop’ forms to suggest linkages between aggressive US foreign policy and a privatised cultural consciousness in her home country. Rosler’s use of fragmentation and dislocation as a means to disrupt the usual flows of mass-media image consumption and reveal hidden connections has been related to the realist strategies of the German theatre-maker and writer Bertolt Brecht (1896-1956). His own book, War Primer, also appears in this exhibition, appropriated and re-worked by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. First published in 1955, it juxtaposes a collection of photographs of the Second World War gleaned from newspapers and magazines with his own short poems. The result was intended to offer both a critique of the conflict and prime readers in how to read images, or, what Brecht called ‘complex seeing’. Superimposing their own low-resolution web-clippings representing the ‘war on terror’, Broomberg and Chanarin updated 100 copies of the original for display. Yet the efforts of radical scholars like Said and contemporary realists, who in their different ways address the same malaise, would be naïve if they did not recognise that opposing the drift to war also demands the provision of socio-economic alternatives to a military industrial complex. Therein lies the political problem. What is the alternative to a war economy?

D IV I D E AN D R U LE ?

At the time of writing this essay (June 2014) Scotland’s independence is to be put to the vote. Many people voting for Scottish independence in September of this year will be doing so because they see the break–up of the United Kingdom as the only real halt to British imperialism. Britain’s investments in its armed forces and defence-related-industries suggest that the imperial mentality certainly outlived the Empire’s formal political character and survived as something more than a mere support act for the financialised ‘super-imperialism’ of the United States. On the other hand, those who would discount the ongoing significance of Britain’s imperialism may point to the frailty of the country’s other industries as a sign of its demise. Yet looked at overall, the British Empire project has never been particularly interested in making things. It has been much more concerned with money-making. Advanced capitalist economies with failed empire projects (e.g. Germany, Italy, Japan) have to make things. Moreover, the resistance on the part of Anglo-American capitalism to transform weapons industries into socially useful production may even defy normal business logic. As the shop stewards at Lucas Aerospace in England discovered in the 1980s, management preferred closures and job losses to the benign and profitable use of the company’s hi-tech engineering capacity which the workers had gone a long way to developing. Among the opportunities management turned down was an order for 2000 mobility aids (hobcarts) for children with Spina Bifida. For some independence looks like a potential escape from such dispiriting experiences and a way for Scotland to become more like a classical Scandinavian social democrac y with a dynamic, productive economy. We cannot say whether such hopes for transformation to a more peace-loving society are justified in Scotland or elsewhere. A much clearer

political reality is the global ascendancy of so called free-market capitalism and the political far-right. This has meant that nationalism, religion and ethnicity are increasingly becoming political and ideological vehicles which temporarily accommodate traditional socialist desires for egalitarian socio-economic development. Although they are politically latent in most countries, arguably these desires are stronger than ever because of the harshness of global competition which business leaders use as an excuse for unemployment, lowering progressive taxation and the privatisation of public sector provision. On their reasoning, the labour rights and relatively strong welfare systems still entertained in Scandinavian countries or in the German social market, if not already outmanoeuvred by capital flows, should be. In so many words business leaders tell us social democratic goals are luxuries we can’t afford.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, authors of the German Communist Party’s 1848 manifesto, called on the workers of the world to unite. Realist messages in film and photography often imply that same goal of solidarity in the face of a multi-faceted system of exploitation. Today, more than ever before, the most effective international institutions and networks function for capitalists not for the working class as a whole. Very few of these institutions and networks are accountable to the broad public. Ours is an epoch of divide and rule. In his motivational talks, Digby Jones, the former Director General of the Confederation of British Industry (who is currently represented by the agency Military Speakers) often remarks to his British listeners that “China wants your lunch and India wants your dinner.” To meet such a challenge thought to come from the hungry and downtrodden Asian masses, Britain must stop being what Jones calls a ‘Gimme Society’ supported by weak and misguided politicians. The general remedy recommended by the business lobby is lower taxes, more hours and years at work (for those that have it), welfare cuts, means testing and the monetary rationalisation of the public sector so that business is free to create wealth. And

unless environmental challenges can be turned into profit-making opportunities they too must take second place to growth measured according to monetarist criteria. The dominant ideology today tells us that business is all about wealth creation. It is no longer a sphere of human activity based on the exploitation of labour and nature as it is regarded in classical political economy analysis.

An increasing number of economists are trying to challenge the airbrushing of public discourse and the capitalist-friendly development of their own discipline. Their perspectives contrast strongly with the sort of remedies recommended by business leaders like Digby Jones. Ha-Joon Chang, a South Korean professor of economics at Cambridge University, points out not only that the causes of business failures and inefficiencies are not confined to state interference in markets but many Asian corporate success stories arose from political rather than entrepreneurial leadership. Business leaders were politically managed and deterred from following their immediate interests. Chang also shows that the history of communist and capitalist economic planning shares many of the same faults in so far as both strategies have concentrated the levers of accumulated wealth and investment in the hands of the few – whether in big business or in big government. Captains of large-scale enterprises know little about their complex functions and the wisest readily admit their ignorance and the limits of their managerial role before dramatic downturns and catastrophes occur. Success and failure through either avenue of ownership actually hinges on human capacities to co-operate on moral grounds and on the development of skills and technology, not cut throat competition within societies or between them.

According to Chang, the glorification of the activities and ingenuity of business leaders, not to mention their increasingly astronomical salaries, bears no relation to the success of large-scale enterprise whether in public or private hands. Moreover, rather than seeing generous education, health and welfare systems as

[Fig. 7] Martha Rosler, Photo-op, from the series: House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series (2004-2008)

Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin/Cologne

outmoded drains on the public purse, such dissident economists argue persuasively that the combined effects of equality and welfare have been a vital catalyst in the development of the dynamic industrial base essential for a nation’s prosperity and economic self-determination. It is one thing for professors of economics, or writers and artists to propose such ideas (and even produce best-sellers) but the capacity for people who work in ‘the left hand of the state’ which provides education, health and welfare services to also articulate a broad collective interest in equality is almost always taken as a political threat. Hi Ho Giro, a slide-to-tape video produced by the Snapcorp photography group in 1994, retells the Disney story of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, this time trying to get by in Wester Hailes, a public housing estate in Edinburgh [see Fig. 8]. The project mocks a declining welfare system and opportunistic local politicians. It emerged not from a left-wing political party or trade union but from community education services.

However in Stuart Platt’s film about the making of Hi Ho Giro, some of its originators express their strong doubts that local community services would tolerate the production of such a collectively minded project now. In line with entrepreneurial ideology, the order of the day is the nurturing of individual creativity not collective critique.

AR G U M E NTS OVE R H EAVE N AN D EARTH

The influential US political scientist Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) is best remembered for his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. As we mentioned above Huntington’s critics recognised his thesis as an attempt to legitimate US hawkishness, especially in relation to Islamic countries and China’s rising influence in the world economy. Cultural scholars like Edward Said, criticised Huntington’s notions of civilisation as simplistic and based on one-dimensional stereotypes. In countering Huntington, Said argued restlessness and social change are integral to all major cultures. Among other things, Huntington took too little account of political internationalism, cross-cultural interaction and multi-cultural society. For Said, his arguments about culture were a clumsy attempt to maintain the United States military dominance by fixing sights on new enemies after the fall of the Soviet Union. Huntington’s riposte to such left-wing criticism came in the form of a reassertion of conservatism in the 2004 book Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. According to Huntington Anglo-protestant culture of America’s original ‘settlers’ was unlike that of later ‘immigrants’ and the success of the

United States has so far depended on the willingness of African-Americans and immigrant groups to embrace the values of this white protestant culture, now under threat as a result of the growth of Latino communities. Concerned with maintaining the civic status quo Huntington also sees the transnational character of corporations undermining the sense of national identity he defends. Another angle on the same demographic phenomenon of ‘hispanization’ comes from the cultural philosopher Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, the author of a 2012 book What if Latin America Ruled the World? The answer is not more military juntas, gangsters and murderous repression, as one may have supposed until the election of left-wing leaders in countries such as Venezuela and Brazil. In Guardiola-Rivera’s view the politics that brought left wing leaders to power reflects the cause of social justice and tolerance which he sees deeply rooted in the continent’s pre-colonial history and indigenous cosmologies. Even more optimistically,

given the persistence of Latin American conservatism, Guardiola-Rivera envisages this social movement as a progressive force in the US thanks to the growth of the same Latino communities which Huntington regards as a danger to US civic values.

What we have here are two competing views of capitalist development coloured by ethnic and religious ideas. From their different standpoints both Huntington and Guardiola-Rivera see ethno-religious diversity as a challenge to the global status quo. Looking at the US in particular, both regard immigrants as a destabilising force coming from below. However much less rosy eyed than Guardiola-Rivera, Huntington sees increased competition for jobs and business coming from bilingual Latinos and he conjures with the potential troubles of a political backlash. What is instructive about this discursively engineered clash of civilisations on the part of two intellectuals – Guardiola-Rivera the avowedly a progressive anti-imperialist and Huntington the arch-conservative and one time advisor to South Africa’s apartheid government – is that neither envisage education as a means of diffusing divisive competition between social groups and cultural chauvinism. Both cosmological political visions overlook the classical social-democratic aims in education and the need to abolish education as a social enterprise that reproduces inequality through the generations. It is hardly surprising that Huntington should ignore policy options designed to establish forms of social solidarity and mutual respect between different social groups which would impinge on the business ethos he holds dear. It is much more remarkable that the left-wing character of contemporary Latin American politics is very rarely questioned on the basis of its poor

performance in terms of educational policy. Even the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, widely thought to have produced Latin America’s most radical socialist State outside Cuba, continues to reproduce great educational inequality. Around 20% of secondary school pupils go to private schools in Venezuela compared to around 7% in Britain and none in Finland – the country with the most highly-rated education system in the world which has also retained one of the most strictly egalitarian systems. These issues of educational policy are not tangential to the issue of war and peace. Indeed they will appear to be central ones when we recognise that wars are often fought to instil social solidarity in societies which have few other means of achieving a politically and economically productive order of things. As Fred Lonidier argues in his video Confessions of the Peace Corps (1974), imperialism today is politically and ideologically complex and ‘that is why the capture of a nation’s educational system becomes the major objective of the imperialist strategy’. Guardiola-Rivera, and many other proponents of the left-turn in Latin American politics, pay little attention to the issues of egalitarian education and much less to its actual implementation as a matter of government policy. Left leaning governments and sympathetic intellectuals like Guardiola-Rivera instead stress the education of the poor. But in itself this can never counter the reproduction of inequality. Indeed from this critical perspective, the rise of the political left in Latin America – after decades of repression which can no longer find justification in the fight against world communism – looks much less radical and more like a concession on the part of Latin American elites. However, in most countries the elites still hold sway over the military it should be remembered. In other words, what can be seen in South America may well be a necessary but tenuous expression of the King’s peace.

The cosmological visions which partly inform c o n t e m p o r a r y L a t i n A m e r i c a n p o l i t i c s a r e little reported by comparison with the Western media’s interest in political Islam. In the eyes of the West it appears inconceivable that Islamic c ou nt r i e s may p ro d u c e a p o l i t i ca l f o r mat i o n roughly equivalent to Christian democracy. The ‘A rab Sp r i ng ’ and d emo crac y i n Eg yp t was a short lived affair thanks to Western support for the removal of Egypt’s first elected President, Dr Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt is now beset by multiple forms of political repression which, in their gruesomeness, surpass those of the deposed military regime of Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011). It cannot be overstated that political repression and institutionalised gender inequality is not a special characteristic of Arab countries or the Islamic world; however, it is frequently made to appear that way. A truer picture of repression in the Middle East shows the role of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in militarising the politics of the whole region. This came at a great cost to the development of civil liberties in societies that were accustomed to colonial rule. When the UN decided to hold a conference on the question of Palestine in Geneva, Edward Said was asked to compile a dossier of historical articles for the conference. Most were vetoed by member states with no reasons given. Said then suggested mounting an exhibition at the conference of Jean Mohr’s photographs taken in Palestine over many years. This was allowed but the descriptive captions Said wrote to accompany the photographs were also vetoed. As Said recalls ‘it turned out at this conference that it was impossible to actually talk about Palestinians as a group, everybody had some objection to it. It was thought of as infringing on sovereignty in Jordan or in Syria or Turkey etc etc so as a result of this quite (...) bizarre decision Jean and I got the idea of doing a book together’.

The result, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives was first published in 1986. It is another example of what is at stake in realism as mode of communication that can unearth the complex meaning of images

[Fig. 8] Snapcorps, Hi Ho Giro (detail) (1994) Courtesy of the photographers

which may appear deceptively simple in the first instance. There are of course many ways to question the naturalism inherent in photography and artists have adopted many strategies such as photomontage and staged photographs to suggest their artifice and ambiguity. Arguably, the real ambiguity of images can never be built into them in the same way that truth, or at least the whole truth, cannot be miraculously conveyed by photographs. The actual space of truth and ambiguity is found in the political (with a small p) relationship between the production and the reception of images. In other words, images are produced for people. They are reached through markets, through institutions, the leagues of interested parties, and more and more through the internet with its more unknown destinations. It is almost impossible to regulate the interpretation of pictures. In time a photograph that begins life in support of one thing may be recruited and turned to the cause of its opposite. This is the real ambiguity and unreliability o f p h o t o g ra p h s re g a rd l e s s o f t h e d e g re e s o f technical accuracy or poetic licence that different image makers may aspire to. Nermine Hammam is an Egyptian born artist educated in the UK and trained in the US, who handles this ambiguity and unravelling of meaning by taking an extreme anti-naturalist approach which lies beyond realism while still owing much to realist awareness. Hammam has sampled Japanese decorative screens to beautify photographs of police brutality in Egypt during the eighteen day revolution in 2011 [see Fig. 9]. Her images are said to ‘mock the artistic industry forming around the revolution.’ The thought that may be provoked by Hammam’s tactic of juxtaposing signs of brutality with motifs of great beauty is that the media spectacle of the Arab Spring can be compared to a decorative screen. According to her, this screen-like spectacle hides stories that standard journalistic reporting fails to capture. However, the works do not tell us what these other stories might be.

P I L LAR S O F L I B E RTY

Though some works in The King’s Peace have attempted to find different audiences for their direct social commentary, Hammam’s artworks remain within the institutions of culture. They inhabit an uncertain space of critical autonomy that has been carved out as an alternative to various degrees instrumentalisation and creative servitude. The Western belief that propaganda falls short of the status of art, and that artistic autonomy is a pillar of liberty, has allowed many free-thinking artists and writers to take on a highly symbolic role for liberalism. Indeed figures including the American philanthropist Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874-1948) regarded the support of individual left-wing artists and writers as a means of forestalling more serious articulations of socialism. Using public and private monies the funding system that the power elite created now amounts to an international institutional formation based on the politics of self-expression. As we have argued the real pillars of liberty are elsewhere. They were built collectively from the struggles of workers connected to broad social movements like that which leveraged the New Deal in the United States of the 1930s.

The development of realism is a fraction of that larger and complex story of modern egalitarian struggle. It began in the Parisian salons of the 18th century where women hosted some of the discussions of the Enlightenment which led to the French revolution. Yet the revolution which radicalised democratic thought across Europe failed to secure equal rights for women in its own epoch. Similarly many expressions

of realism in art and literature reflect their creative-entrepreneurial origins and pay scant attention to workers’ rights and the everyday politics of organised labour. This may be one reason why, as a commodity among others, realist projects have failed to counter a wholesale privatisation of cultural life. In this regard scandals about Rupert Murdoch’s media empire seem to be the tip of an iceberg. Evidently much more is required of realism in the 21st century.

In his 2010 book The Return of the Public, Dan Hind charts the misinformation and distorted facts that

passed for good journalism in relation to both the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the banking crisis which began in 2007. Hind believes that the public is substantially misguided by news and entertainment industries managed by the great and the good. Like the economist Ha-Joon Chang mentioned above, Hind sees private and public corporations mirroring each other’s faults and playing down some of the deeper implications of their different ownerships. Hind argues for a new system of commissioning for research and journalism so that the general public is directly involved in considering and selecting investigative projects to be done in society’s interest. He thinks political ideas such as the ‘public interest’ and the ‘common good’ can only be put into effective practice through active participation. Many technocrats would argue of course that such a democratisation of cultural production would be inefficient and time-consuming, not least because reaching funding decisions could involve various rounds of public debate. Suitably qualified or experienced people in business, public organisations and politics should – it is conventionally objected – take care of these matters on behalf of the public. But for Hind and other believers in cultural democracy the process is just as important as the outcome. It is only as a result of such processes that we can truly talk of the existence of the ‘public’ that the European enlightenment brought into being as a political body – what is often called civil society. It is still too early to judge the revolutions that have been based in the ideas of the European Enlightenment. History has not ended. Meanwhile the aesthetic patina of realism now largely cut loose from popular social movements may circulate in a marketplace of ideas, a cultural commodity among others. But, despite this reality, we have argued that realism in photographs and film does have a role to play, especially in countering the subversion of democracy that takes place when the system is used as a justification for war-making.

By Owen Logan with Kirsten Lloyd

There is much at stake in the capacity of realists to tackle war as a whole political, economic and ideological state of affairs. It is

an essential task in any democracy which deserves the name.

Sources and Further Reading…

Babeuf, G. (1967) (Scott, J.A. Translator) Defense of Gracchus Babeuf Before the High Court of Vendome (Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts)

Boltanski, L. and Chiapello, E. (2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso)

Chang, H.J. (2011) 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism (London: Penguin)

Cooley, M. (1987) Architect or Bee? The Human Price of Technology (London: Hogarth Press)

Enzensberger, H.M. (1982) ‘The Industrialisation of the Mind’ in Critical Essays Grimm, R. & Armstrong, B. (eds) (New York: Continuum)

Guardiola-Rivera, O. (2010) What If Latin America Ruled the World? (London: Bloomsbury)

Huntington, S. (2004) Who Are We? America’s Great Debate (London: Simon & Schuster)

Hariman, R. and Lucaites, J.L. (2007) No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (London: University of Chicago Press)

Hirst, P. (2003) War in the 21st Century (Cambridge: Polity)

Hind, D. (2010) The Return of the Public (London: Verso)

Marx, K. (1852) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm (Last Accessed July 2014)

Motton, G. (2009) Helping Themselves: The Left Wing Middle Classes in the Theatre and the Arts (Deal: Levellers Press)

Logan O. (2012) ‘Where Pathos Rules: The Resource Curse in Visual Culture’, in Flammable Societies: Studies on the Socio-economics of Oil and Gas, McNeish, J.A. & Logan, O. (eds.) (London: Pluto Press)

Logan, O. (2010) ‘Comment “Art Workers Don’t Kiss Ass”’, Variant Magazine Issue 37 (Glasgow: Variant)

Said, E. & Glass, C., (2003) Edward Said, The Last Interview, https://archive.org/details/EdwardSaid-TheLastInterview-2003 (Last Accessed, July 2014)

Saunders, F.S. (1999) The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press)

Tilly, C. (1975) The Formation of Nation States in Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press)

[Fig. 9] Nermine Hammam, Press, from the series Unfolding (2012)

Courtesy of Rose Issa Projects