My grandfather was a welder in Bradford when he joined the army as a private in the Second World War. He has told me of vigorous discussions about revolutionary socialism with fellow privates. Some of them were reading Marx. The doors of history seem to have swung shut on such meetings, at least here and for the time being, but my grandfather has remained a socialist, in a way that Tony Blair et al would find merely embarrassing. The auld fella has ‘failed to move with the times’ but then, the mere drift of time is hardly a moral compass. I can remember some of the political discussions he would have with my uncle, who was then a bank clerk. A familiar charge against Socialism was that it involved inertias of bureaucracy. Capitalism, as we are told, does away with bureaucracy. My grandfather would point out that capitalism indeed had a vast bureaucracy – what are banks but the bureaucracy of capitalism by another name. In this he was uncannily (and unknowingly, I might add) close to Lenin: ‘Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers' societies, and office employee unions.’
Perhaps, then, one of the tasks of radical thought must address this question of names. What is ‘advertising’ for example, but corporate propaganda? Certainly the term ‘advertising’ is euphemistic nonsense, a kind of linguistic decoy. In truth, we are continually assailed with messages that have a palpable design on us. We are definitely not dealing with the disinterested transparency of ‘information’. It is scarcely information at all, since it offers us nothing as to the use-value or production details of its wares, instead turning these wares into signifiers of immaterial values, attaching cultural tags to them (‘coolness’ ‘masculinity’ ‘bourgeois sophistication’ or whatever), bumping up exchange value by reference to Symbolic Value and, in short, extending a promise that it neither can nor wishes to fulfil.
Take another example. ‘Governments skim off our earned wealth through taxation; this differentiates them from businesses which have no such power’. But what is the capitalist’s surplus value but a ‘skimming off’ of the wealth the worker has created. What we must do, then, is to strip things of their familiar names, which have merged with what they name and so taken on a spurious objectivity. Truth can only be arrived at through the violent act of renaming, ‘unnatural’ to Common Sense, where common sense is just solidified ideology - historical distortions that have become ‘second nature’ and consequently forgotten. It was Proust who said: “If God and the Father created things by naming them, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that the artist recreates them.” And so we might rewrite this as: If Ideology has created our present ‘reality’ by conflating things with their names, it is by taking away their names or giving them others that radical thinking opens up the world for transformation. The first baptism, however, must be to name capitalism itself – for the absence of this name systematically muffles our ability to speak meaningfully of anything else.