First published on the Critical Studies in Television blog​

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster" - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

"Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart" - James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

For docudrama obsessives like me, a new Peter Kosminsky production is always eagerly anticipated and the unfolding of The State over four consecutive evenings on Channel 4 last week made for a particularly intense viewing experience. Like most of Kosminsky’s television work, The State is an exhaustively researched drama with a bold premise: four Britons travel to Raqqa to join the Islamic State, but soon discover that daily life in the caliphate is not all it’s cracked up to be by its online advocates. Although some of the new recruits remain true believers until the end, others are repulsed by the slaughter, slavery and torture that they witness.
 
Two characters, in particular, refuse to become the monsters IS wants them to be. A medical doctor, Shakira (Ony Uhiara), travels to Syria with her young son, determined to help build the caliphate; yet she struggles to accept IS’s barbaric treatment of women and finally decides to flee from Syria when she finds her child and other junior recruits playing football with a severed head. The drama’s other central protagonist, the sensitive, doe-eyed Jalal (Sam Otto), also comes to question the actions of his new comrades: why, he asks, do they slaughter their Shia enemies when they are retreating – an action proscribed by the Quran? He is told in reply that the caliphate must brutally ‘establish’ itself and that ‘there will be time for mercy later’.
 
The State shows the essential hypocrisy of the IS demagogues, who rationalize their own viciousness and denounce all others as infidels. Indeed, as Hegel famously observed, ‘evil resides in the very gaze which perceives evil all around itself’ and in a drama that is very much about witnessing and looking, the recruits who resist IS must literally refuse this 'evil gaze': when Jalal attends a public beheading, for example, he averts his eyes at the crucial moment (see image above). Such refusals reveal the ambivalence and fundamental decency of some of the militants. After all, whatever the tabloid newspapers may say, not all of the young zealots who join IS are monsters. Many of them are less evil than misguided, duped by Internet propaganda, disaffected by capitalist modernity, and ignorant of any genuinely emancipatory perspective.
 
Betrayal – especially betrayal by organizations and institutions – is a recurring theme in Kosminsky’s oeuvre. In No Child of Mine (1997), twelve-year-old Kerry is sexually abused by a succession of family members and care workers. In The Project (2002), a group of enthusiastic young politicos enter the Labour Party of the 1990s with high ideals, but are forced to compromise their principles at every turn. The Government Inspector (2005) indicts New Labour even more strongly, going so far as to portray the suicide of the government weapons inspector David Kelly in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. And 2011’s The Promise depicts the abandonment of Arabs in Palestine by the departing soldiers of the British Mandate, showing its violent consequences in 1947 and the present day. In The State, too, betrayal is a key theme: not only have these young men and women been lied to by the propagandists of IS; in signing up for jihad, they have betrayed their own better natures. The point is emphasized in the final episode when Jalal, whose faith in Daesh is already wavering, is visited by his father Munir (Nitin Ganatra). Munir scolds his son for destroying his family and for betraying the enlightened values of toleration and multiculturalism that, in his view, characterize British society.
 
The question remains: why are some Westerners susceptible to jihadist ideology? More specifically, why would a headstrong and savvy medical doctor like Shakira have any interest in joining a misogynistic death cult? This question has been addressed in several recent films. In Mijke de Jong’s Layla M. (2016), for example, a young Muslim woman living in Amsterdam is increasingly angered by social discrimination against Muslims and by video images coming out of Syria and Gaza; she eventually leaves for a new life in Jordan, but soon regrets her decision. The process of ‘radicalization’ was also explored a decade ago in Kosminsky’s own two-parter Britz (2007), in which another educated and politically conscious medic, Nasima (Manjinder Virk), is driven into the embrace of Al Qaeda in a narrative that moves between the UK and Pakistan.
 
Britz offered a powerful indictment of the British state, linking the political disaffection of young British Muslims to their experiences of Islamophobic prejudice and anti-terror legislation in the wake of 9/11. The State is more limited in its locational range and political scope: after an initial three-minute montage showing the recruits leaving the UK, the rest of the drama concentrates on their new lives in Syria. This surprised and slightly disappointed me, as I had been expecting the kind of interwoven 'home and abroad' narrative structure offered in Britz and some of Kosminsky’s other geopolitical dramas, such as Warriors (1999) and The Promise (2011). While Kosminsky’s depiction of the recruits’ new life in Syria is enlightening, I would have appreciated some exploration of the domestic experiences and political grievances that pushed these intelligent young folk towards the ideological abyss. The absence of such backstory makes The State, for all its contemporary relevance, a less satisfying treatment of terrorism than Britz. While Kosminsky does sometimes hint at the motivations of his central characters, there are rather a lot of unanswered questions at the end of episode 4. Shakira, for example, remains something of an enigma to the end. And while we might guess that he is attempting to atone for past misdeeds, we never discover exactly why a former British soldier, Abu Ibrahim Al-Brittani (Jack Greenlees), has joined the jihadists.  
 
In his book Reason, Faith and Revolution, Terry Eagleton writes that our age is 'divided between those who believe far too much and those who believe far too little'. Today’s Western-born 'Islamic' terrorist belongs to the first category: as Alain Badiou points out in The True Life, he typically rejects the 'empty' subject positions offered by liberal capitalism, namely, individualistic careerism on the one hand, and hedonistic, perpetual adolescence (or what the late Mark Fisher termed 'depressive hedonia') on the other. However nihilistic it may ultimately be, jihadism promises young people an attractive alternative set of values and the sense of social belonging and political purpose that so many of them find lacking in mainstream Western culture. Many recruits are driven by righteous fury at the barbarism of Western imperialism, but unable to see that IS offers only a mirror image of that violence. Some, like Shakira, seem to be motivated by humanitarian impulses. Still others are drawn to IS by the promise of romance: perhaps the drama’s most pitiful character is the naive teenager Ushna (Shavani Cameron), who dreams of marrying a heroic warrior and becoming ‘a lioness amongst the lions’. In an alienating society, some people, it seems, will go anywhere and do anything to achieve a sense of love and belonging. And The State shows just how warm and welcoming IS can be – initially, at least – towards its new recruits.
 
Kosminsky’s style is, as ever, understated and effective here. The preponderance of following shots and over-the-shoulder shots allows the viewer to move with the protagonists and thus to discover the horrors of religious extremism from their perspective. And while the tone of the drama becomes progressively more sombre, there are some darkly droll touches throughout. The wall of the schoolroom in which the female recruits have their induction session, for example, displays a cheerful rainbow composed of brightly coloured strips of paper – a bitterly ironic symbol of hope for the future. The bright pink suitcase with which Ushna travels to Syria (the other, more practical recruits carry rucksacks) is similarly absurd, but serves as a touching reminder of the teenager’s childish innocence.
 
Given Kosminsky’s record as a maker of ‘controversial’ television, it was inevitable that he would be accused by right-wing pundits of glamorizing terrorism. Such criticisms are, however, quite wrong-headed: Kosminsky’s sympathies lie with the betrayed recruits of IS, not with the organization itself, which he thoroughly condemns. If anything, The State should be seen as a counter-narrative to IS propaganda. These days, of course, politicians and filmmakers are eager to promote an anti-terror agenda via the cultural industries: in February 2016 US Secretary of State John Kerry even met with the heads of major studios to discuss ways of incorporating anti-IS messages into Hollywood films. Kosminsky, however, avoids the racial stereotyping that so often characterizes Hollywood portrayals of terrorists – especially when they are Muslim. The State may not be Kosminsky’s most penetrating or critical drama, but it provides a rare insight into the workings of a terrifying organization and the strange attraction it holds for its deluded acolytes.

Guy Hibbert is no stranger to controversial drama. No Child of Mine - his rendering of an horrific real-life child abuse case brilliantly directed by Peter Kosminsky - was one of the most disturbing and moving British television productions of the 1990s. So I had high hopes for his recent Channel 4 one-off drama Complicit, which follows MI5 agent Edward Ekubo (David Oyelowo) in hot pursuit of a suspected terrorist, Waleed Achmed (Arsher Ali), from Britain to Egypt in order to foil a suspected ricin attack on the United Kingdom. Slow and stylistically unostentatious, Complicit marks a welcome departure from the high octane formula of US 'war on terror' dramas such as 24, Threat Matrix and Homeland; but its take on the relationship between terrorism and the British state nevertheless reproduces some of the conservative elements of those shows.

It is curious that some television reviewers have praised the moral complexity of Complicit on the grounds that the drama gives us no 'goodie' to root for and no 'baddie' to condemn. In fact, Ekubo and Achmed are clearly identifiable as the hero and villain of the piece, respectively. The latter is a shady, sneering figure whom Ekubo observes on surveillance tapes bellowing 'British troops burn in hell!' at an anti-war demonstration (this chanting is heard in sinister extradiegetic overdub when Achmed appears later in the film). Achmed is also a malicious racist. Ekubo, on the other hand, is a decent, hardworking and competent agent who nevertheless remains something of an outsider at MI5, under-promoted and alienated from his Establishment colleagues. There are strong implications that racism has played a part in his marginalisation. Frustrated by these workplace problems and his lack of progress in the case - and horrified by Achmed's apparent disregard for human life - Ekubo allows his suspect to be tortured by the Egyptian police.

This turns out to be a big mistake, for the twist in the tale is that Achmed has played Ekubo like a fiddle. There is no ricin attack and Ekubo realises too late that he has been cleverly manipulated by his quarry so that the latter can gain a propaganda advantage. Drawing attention to his torture in the media, Achmed subsequently presents himself to the world as a victim of anti-Islamic prejudice. The disgraced Ekubo, meanwhile, is indefinitely suspended from his post for breaking the rules. For Ekubo, torture - in this case, at least - not only fails to bear fruit, but proves to be counter-productive.

The producers of Complicit certainly deserve credit for problematizing the use of torture; yet viewers are hardly encouraged to adopt a critical stance towards either Ekubo or the 'war on terror'. The film's crucial scene is a tense interrogation-room confrontation in which Ekubo and Achmed exchange their conflicting views of the world. Formally, this is an equally balanced battle of wits between a jihadist and state 'spook'; yet even when Achmed advances some reasonable arguments, the viewer is left in little doubt where her sympathies ought to lie. When Achmed condemns the British invasion of Iraq and other countries, he is ridiculed by Ekubo, who counters by enumerating the freedoms supposedly enjoyed by British people, including 'free schools', 'state handouts' and the 'freedom to say and do what you want'. And any lingering sympathy the viewer may have with Achmed's arguments about the brutality of British imperialism dissipates when Achmed calls Ekubo a 'fucking kaffir' and a 'nigger'. How can the viewer take seriously any point of view articulated by such a monstrous bigot - or, for that matter, object to his torture?

The ending of the drama is equally problematic. In his exit interview with his boss at MI5, Ekubo is taken to task for allowing Achmed's torture; but he protests:

"What else could I have done? Weighing up the illegality against the consequences of doing nothing? I've always understood that we work with politically unacceptable regimes if it means we are safeguarding our people from attack at home [...] Everything I've done has been for my country, for the people of my country"

The patriotic message here is clear enough: the security of 'our people' can only be achieved through the suspension of human rights and the illegal but necessary use of force by agents of 'our' state (an 'acceptable' regime, no doubt). This is in essence the perspective of Kathryn Bigelow's recent film Zero Dark Thirty, whose 'normalisation' of torture has been challenged by Slavoj Žižek in terms that are highly relevant here: 'Torture saves lives? Maybe, but for sure it loses souls – and its most obscene justification is to claim that a true hero is ready to forsake his or her soul to save the lives of his or her countrymen'.

Ekubo is certainly a troubled figure at the conclusion of the film, as he stands on the banks of the Thames watching the world go by and presumably reflecting on the wisdom of his actions (a reprise, strangely enough, of Oyelowo's pose in the final scene of the 2006 BBC drama Shoot the Messenger). Indeed, we end on a rather questioning note: in the final shot, Ekubo looks directly into the camera, as if to ask viewers what they would have done in his position. But this 'open' gesture is hardly sufficient to override Ekubo's explicit, patriotic justification for torture. Moreover, the preceding shots of Londoners happily going about their daily business seem to confirm that Edward has indeed done the right thing and that only similarly decisive actions in the future can safeguard the 'British way of life'. In the drama's conservative framework, people like Achmed simply hate 'us' for who we are and are hell-bent on destroying Western society and its supposedly liberal values.

Defenders of Complicit may point to the the production's unglamorous style, as well as its troubled hero and the supposed moral complexity of the situation he finds himself in. Indeed, the film is pervaded by a sense of indeterminacy: Ekubo often seems to be distracted, homing in on seemingly irrelevant details (for example, during a visit to his superior's office, a point of view shot reveals that he is focusing on a box of antacids) and he is often shot in shallow focus, creating blurred backgrounds that seem to reflect his uncertain state of mind. Yet despite these markers of uncertainty, complexity, 'seriousness ' and, indeed, 'quality', the production tends to foreclose criticism of the state's anti-terrorism methods or the relationship between jihadist terrorism and imperialist aggression. Complicit, like so much 'terrorism TV' (I borrow the phrase from Stacy Takacs's superb book on the subject), contributes to the naturalisation of the 'state of exception' along with its disciplinary apparatuses of surveillance, detention and torture.

For anybody with a critical perspective on these topics, however, the one-off in-house BBC drama Our Girl, written by veteran Tony Grounds and starring EastEnders actress Lacey Turner, is even more troubling.

Molly Dawes (Turner) is a working class girl from East London who joins the British army in order to escape from her obnoxious Albanian boyfriend Artan (Dan Black) and her selfish and racist father (Sean Gallagher), who spends his days smoking, drinking and playing violent video games. Commencing her training programme, Molly soon adapts to the rigours of military discipline and the army becomes her surrogate family.

Our Girl reproduces many of the generic scripts of military-themed 'human interest' documentaries, such as BBC3's Girls on the Frontline (2010): an emphasis on personal sacrifice, an unquestioning acceptance of the necessity for military intervention overseas, and a focus on its subject's transition from a restricting working class milieu to the excitement and challenge of army life. As several television critics have noted, the rather idealised depiction of Molly's military training resembles an army recruitment video. Indeed, the drama offers a highly affirmative view of the army and its mandate, counterposing Molly's desire to 'do something' with her slobbish father's goal of securing long-term incapacity benefit (at a moment when benefit claimants are under attack in the mainstream media, this portrait of a 'benefit scrounger', like Ekubo's reference to 'state handouts' in Complicit, is problematic). At the end of the drama, Molly proudly 'passes out' as a soldier and goes to Afghanistan, while her father lounges at home watching news reports about Al Qaeda bombings. The implication of this parallel editing is clear: Molly is about to play her part in tackling terrorism, while her feckless father rots on the sofa.

Our Girl's sympathetic representation of an army woman fighting prejudice at home is not the only narrative of its type. A similar transference of regressive attitudes from the 'serving' female soldier onto an unpleasant male relative is apparent in the British director Brian Welsh's 2010 film In Our Name, in which Joanne Frogatt plays Suzy, a female soldier returning home from a tour of duty in Iraq. Suzy is traumatized, not after killing children herself, but after witnessing Iraqis killing children and feeling 'powerless to protect those we were sent to help'. On returning to her Middlesborough home, she is applauded by her father for 'making this country safe for us all', but viciously abused by her racist, psychopathic husband. As in Complicit, any potential critique of British imperialism is displaced into the text's anti-racist and anti-sexist politics.

Yet the drama's most direct pro-war statement comes earlier in the film, when Molly returns to London on leave with her meek training colleague Katy (Katherine Pearce). Here Molly must cope with the incomprehension of her friends, who cannot understand why she has 'joined up', and her father's insistence that she stay in England and get married. It is at this point that Katy finds her voice for the first time, drawing a parallel between Molly's father and boyfriend and the patriarchal control of women in Afghanistan: 'You know, that's exactly what we're fighting for in Afghanistan', she tells Molly's father, 'So that women can have a say in who they marry or if they get married at all'. Since Molly's father can only respond with a racist rant, Katy's 'feminist' argument prevails.

But here the drama is on very thin ice. Certainly, the argument that the invasion of Afghanistan was undertaken for the benefit of Afghan women was widely touted in the news media in the run-up to the war, and, as Wikileaks has revealed, was promoted by the CIA in order to boost flagging public support for the occupation. Yet it is difficult to believe that this was ever anything more than a flimsy pretext for imperialist intervention. In a devastating critique of the 'progressive' argument for the invasion of Afghanistan, Carole Stabile and Deepa Kumar note that the liberation of women was neither the aim of the war nor its result. Pointing to the Orientalist dimensions of the supposed drive to 'save' Muslim women, they argue that 'the rhetoric of women's liberation' was 'a cynical ploy' and even 'a lie as monumental as the claims about WMD'. It is therefore unfortunate that the producers of Our Girl are content to give such rhetoric a free pass.

All too often in British television dramas about the 'war on terror', criticisms of Western imperialism are either absent or articulated by such unpleasant characters that they cannot be taken seriously, while the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are justified by appeals to the feminist discourse of 'liberation'. In the three-part Occupation (2009), for example - the BBC's only drama about the Iraq war - the most trenchant criticism of the coalition invasion is placed in the mouth of a corrupt Iraqi policeman-turned-terrorist, while the drama as a whole casts the British forces in Iraq as liberators rather than invaders, victims rather than perpetrators of violence.

Yet British television audiences have been offered more critical perspectives on the war on terror over the last decade. Peter Kosminsky's The Government Inspector (Channel 4, 2005), for instance, questioned the role of the Labour government in taking Britain to war in Iraq, while his later Britz (Channel 4, 2007) was equally critical of the effects of domestic 'anti-terror' laws on British Muslims following 9/11. Tony Marchant's The Mark of Cain (Channel 4, 2006), meanwhile, remains the only television drama to have seriously engaged with the issue of prisoner abuse by the British army. These dramas interrogate the conduct of 'our' state in the war on terror; dramas such as Complicit and Our Girl, on the other hand, emphasize - one implicitly, the other explicitly - the threat posed by the terrorist 'other'.

In his book Democracy Incorporated, Sheldon Wolin warns that 'in the reality of the war between imperialism and terrorism, the contemporary citizen, far from being invited into a discussion, is, as never before, being manipulated by "managed care" and by the managers of fear'. We need television fictions that challenge rather than reinforce this state of affairs, that 'invite discussion' about terrorism and imperialism and their interrelationship. Controversial as they may be, the dramas of Kosminsky and Marchant certainly do this. They show the way forward for writers and producers who are prepared to criticise the 'home team', to cut through the bias and distortion that has so often characterised the treatment of the war on terror in both journalism and screen fiction.

The best docudramas seem to become more relevant with time. In 1996, Jimmy McGovern's Granada Television production Hillsborough controversially suggested that South Yorkshire police had tampered with evidence in an attempt to cover up the responsibility of the police for the football stadium disaster and blame Liverpool supporters for the tragedy. Only recently, in 2012, has the Hillsborough Independent Panel exposed the vast extent of the police cover-up. McGovern's production - thought by some at the time to be bordering on conspiracy theory - has been thoroughly vindicated by recent events. Similarly, Peter Kosminsky's Israel-Palestine drama The Promise was broadcast on Channel 4 early last year; but given the bloodshed in Gaza over the past few weeks, the film's condemnation of Israeli state terrorism seems more relevant today.

In The Promise, Kosminsky's uses the dual time frame device he employed in his 1999 drama Warriors, which depicted the experiences of British soldiers on a UN 'peace-keeping' mission in the 1992-95 Bosnian war. Warriors evokes a parallel between the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews in the 1940s and those committed in Bosnia by Croat and Serb forces against Muslims in the 1990s. The argument of the film is that the British should have been mandated to 'intervene' in the conflict and save lives. Similarly, The Promise intercuts the story of Len (Christian Cooke), a British soldier who witnesses the chaos as the British forces leave Palestine in 1948, with that of his granddaughter Erin (Claire Foy), who, equipped with her grandfather's diary (there are echoes of Ken Loach's Land and Freedom here) visits Israel/Palestine in 2005 and discovers the extent of Israeli violence - both military and civilian - against Palestinians in the present day. The contemporary treatment of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli army, Kosminsky implies, is at least in part a consequence of the British 'betrayal' of Palestine 60 years ago.

Kosminsky argues that the British forces left the Palestinians to the mercy of the settlers and the 1940s scenes unsparingly depict the terrorisation of Palestinians in some of the key events of the Nakba, notably the Deir Yassin massacre and the Battle of Haifa (events that have received relatively little attention from film-makers). In the scenes set in 2005, Kosminsky foregrounds the ideological dimensions of the Israeli-Arab conflict in the scenes featuring Erin and her British-Israeli friend Eliza (Perdita Weeks), who is completing her army service in the Israeli Defence Force and happily participating in the bulldozing of Palestinian homes (the political polarisation of close friends or family is a theme Kosminsky caries over from his 2007 drama Britz, in which a British Muslim brother and sister adopt two very different responses to the British state's 'war on terror' following the 7/7 bombings: one becoming a suicide bomber, the other a state spy). Thankfully, however, Kosminsky does not fall into leftist trap of glorifying Hamas. In fact, a Hamas militant is portrayed negatively and when her guide in Gaza takes her to the home of family grieving for the death of their 'martyred' daughter, Erin expresses her visceral disgust at suicide bombing. Kosminsky thus quite rightly condemns the terrorism of both the Israeli and the Palestinian leaderships - while at the same time identifying Israel as the overwhelmingly more aggressive 'side' in the conflict (if only on account of its overwhelming military supremacy).

So far so good. But as I have argued in relation to Warriors, Kosminsky may be better at diagnosing problems than proposing solutions. As in Warriors, the British forces in The Promise are seen as neutral intermediaries capable of 'keeping the peace' if only they were allowed to do so. Yet the history of British colonialism in Palestine makes this perspective implausible, to say the least. As Richard Seymour notes in The Liberal Defence of Murder:

"The British had relied to a great extent on the Zionist movement in the crushing of the Arab revolt between 1936 and 1939. Jewish settlers were integrated into a Jewish supernumerary police and Special Night Squads, led by the British army officer Orde Wingate. The latter in particular acted as death squads, and became notorious for their brutality in the suppression of the Arab revolt, fully availing themselves of torture, beatings and summary executions."

Such facts rather undermine one's faith in British neutrality, just as the bloody history of British military involvement in the Middle East (and pretty much everywhere else in the world) undermines humanitarian justifications for British interventionism today.

Indeed, since Warriors, Kosminsky seems to have developed a rather bad case of 'interventionitis', an increasingly widespread condition among liberals since the 1990s. From a Marxist perspective, however, it is impossible for capitalist states (or indeed states-in-waiting such as Hamas) to impose 'peace'; that is the task of the Israeli and Palestinian working classes and it will only be achieved through their struggles against their respective bourgeoisies. These struggles (such as the protests against rising prices in Israel) had been developing in the past year, but seem to have been eclipsed by the recent increase in hostilities.

Despite this criticism, The Promise is an unusual and valuable drama that is underpinned, like all of Kosminsky's work, by careful research and by Kosminsky's determination to tell controversial stories (such as his 1990 Yorkshire Television docudrama Shoot to Kill, which alleged widespread corruption in the Royal Ulster Constabulary), whatever the consequences. It is surely to Kosminsky's credit that the Ministry of Defence has instructed its employees, following the David Kelly docudrama The Government Inspector, not to speak to the film-maker. Although Kosminsky has stoutly defended the historical accuracy of The Promise, the production has already been condemned by pro-Israel individuals and organisations. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry has even compared the production to the Nazi propaganda film Jud Süß! Indeed, the controversy surrounding The Promise will ensure that Kosminsky's work continues to be hated by all the right people for many years to come.

Finally, here's another thing for Kosminsky's Zionist critics to consider. Working class Jews could hardly have cared less for the British 'promise' of Jewish statehood. The Greek socialist Aghis Stinas writes in his Memoirs – Sixty Years under the Flag of Socialist Revolution:

"We knew about the 'Balfour declaration', the official promise made to the Jews by the British government during the First World War that it would set them up on the soil 'of their fathers.' The Jewish community and the Thessaloniki synagogue had called the Jews together to celebrate the news. The gathering took place in the morning, and behind closed doors. The afternoon of the same day masses of Jewish workers and intellectuals took to the streets, waving red flags, with these slogans: 'It is not in the state of Israel but in the world socialist society, united fraternally with all the peoples of the world, that we, the Jews, will guarantee our lives, our security and our well-being,' 'Long live the world socialist revolution,' 'Down with Zionism.'

Now that the nationalistic frenzy of the Olympics is over, 'public service' television is reverting to a more open assault on the working class. Channel 4, not for the first time, is indulging in some shameless class propaganda tonight in the form of Tricks of the Dole Cheats, which is scheduled for broadcast at 8pm. For those who'd rather take action than get angry, there is a Facebook page supplying more information about the production, as well as some useful counter-arguments and some suggestions as to what people can do to protest.

Postscript: As many people have commented in the social media, the programme broadcast by Channel 4 focused less on the 'dole cheats' themselves - raising the question of why the programme was given such a stigmatising title - than on the ways in which slack procedures at Job Centres allow claimants to 'get away with' (as the presenter Morland Sanders put it) not looking for work. Despite this slightly unexpected focus, the programme nevertheless managed to demonise benefit claimants as well as Job Centre staff (many of whom feel uneasy that the government is trying to prevent them from helping those in need). As the void blog argues, the programme also appeared to be 'laying the ground for privatisation of benefit services, with a handful of recruitment sector spivs brought in to show how much better they would be at the job'.

Christian Garland's email response to Channel 4 makes very clear why such programming is unacceptable, setting the programme in the context of the government's current drive to cut the cost of benefits paid to the poor and disabled:

Dear Channel 4,

I write to you to add my voice to the many people unhappy with the Dispatches programme Tricks of the Dole Cheats, aired at 20:00 on Monday evening (13/08/12). To start with, the salacious, eye-grabbing title, one that the Daily Mail or Express - or for that matter, The Sun, would be proud of, this was clearly aimed at generating maximum tabloid hysteria, and of course, viewing figures, for a shabby apology for 'factual' programming, which even by the (very) low standard set by Channel 4, scraped a new all-time low.

Whilst the quality of Channel 4's factual output - as for all other kinds sadly - has been in steep and serious decline for the best part of 20 years now, what is especially dubious about this 30 minute tabloid hack job, was the extremely unwelcome contribution it made to the Tory-led coalition's ongoing assault on anyone unfortunate enough to have to have dealings with the punitive benefits system, as well as the media's propagandist line in the demonisation of them. 

The programme's title was also extremely misleading, since the expected 'tricks' of 'dole cheats' - seriously, was that copy and pasted from The Sun online, and slightly revised to avoid copyright breaches? - were not forthcoming at all. It would have been contemptable enough if this had been another straightforward attack on the unemployed and other claimants, but the programme still had much to offer in that regard, even though the title was completely different from the implied content. 

Morland Sanders, the presenter, who in the best tradition of those who speak from where they don't know - or have any idea - took the miserable reality of claiming JSA, and the requirement that claimants record what they have 'been doing' to find employment every two weeks when signing on, as 'getting away with it'. As someone who has had that distinctly tepid pleasure in the past on two seperate occasions, I can speak from experience, and tell you that were a claimant not to undertake this (yes, largely pointless) fortnightly task, they would have their JSA frozen forthwith. To quote and counter Morland Sanders here, a JSA claimant can most certainly not '[...] write on their jobseeker's agreement, "I'm not going to apply for this job, and I'd rather stay on benefits". So, to answer Morland Sanders' speculative assertion, 'It does make me think, that if you wanted to actively avoid work and stay on benefits, you could.' No, you couldn't. 

The requirement is part of the punitive workfare regime that has existed in some form or another in the UK, since 1984 - a sickly apt year. The Tory coalition has accelerated and intensified the punitive welfare-to-work regime of putting claimants under constant pressure and always shifting the burden for unemployment back onto the shoulders of the individual: social problems, societal problems, become individual failings, and a matter of 'not trying hard enough' and 'not applying yourself'. Recently of course, Grayling and Duncan-Smith have excelled themselves in trying to introduce the 'work programme' in which claimants are mandated to work unpaid or have their derisory JSA withdrawn - the kind of choice offered by the DWP being thus: you don't have one. The sick irony of all of this 'getting people back to work' is that there is none to go to. 

The programme made much of the cost to the taxpayer of those working whilst claiming benefits - £226 million; but offshore tax avoidance costs in the region of £15-25 billion, so it is curious Channel 4 should choose to focus on the 0.8 % of benefit expenditure lost to fraud, and not the ongoing efforts of the super-rich and corporations to avoid paying tax in the UK, a figure which dwarfs the relatively tiny one spent on benefit fraud, and at a time when Gideon Osborne repeats the necessity of a further £18 billion of cuts to what little remains of the already inadequate social safety net. Once again, 99.2% of benefit expenditure was not fraudulent, and it is remarkable that Channel 4 should prefer to focus on those at the bottom of the social pyramid, something it has a tawdry recent history of indulging in, what others have called 'poverty porn' - Benefit Busters, The Fairy Jobmother, etc. There is, after all, only so long dinner parties can be enlivened by chatter of house prices and getting the kids into a good school, so this sort of vicarious titiliation offers something to avoid that sort of repetition; however, it does nothing at all for Channel 4's reputation.

CG

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, China barely featured in the British media. In fact, despite being an avid television viewer, I can barely remember watching a single television programme about the country. For those of my generation, the media spectacle we craved was furnished by the United States in the form of hit television dramas and Hollywood films. For me and my sisters growing up, Americans assumed Brobdingnagian proportions in our imaginations, so much so that when I encountered a group of US pensioners on holiday in Aviemore in 1984, I distinctly recall being disappointed by their frail, 'ordinary' appearance. Had the television lied to me? Were Americans mere mortals, after all?

How times have changed. Hollywood may continue to exercise a powerful influence over our imaginations, but we all now know that America is dying and that the Chinese are our new overlords. Time, then, for the television documentarists to bring in the big academic guns to make sense of it all. Niall Ferguson’s recent three-part Channel 4 series China: Triumph and Turmoil attempts to understand the economic, political and social development of China. Ferguson's presentation is characteristically breezy and engaging; yet his analysis is undermined by its one-sided argumentation and its tendentious understanding of Chinese history.

Throughout the three episodes of the documentary, Ferguson consistently refers to Chinese people in the third person plural. Indeed, a nationalist and antagonistic ‘them’ versus ‘us’ framework structures Ferguson’s narrative and underpins the kinds of questions he asks. How do the Chinese think? What has kept ‘their’ society together for so long? Why do ‘they’ admire Mao? And how might all of this one day become ‘our’ problem? As these questions suggest, Ferguson assumes that nationality is the only category through which it is possible to distinguish the peoples of the world. But is it not possible that a worker in the UK has more in common with a worker in China than she does with her British boss? Such questions do not occur to Ferguson, who, as a self-confessed academic 'on the side of the bourgeoisie', tends to interpret geopolitical issues in terms of competing nation states and economies, rather than classes. There's also a good deal of cultural stereotyping going on here. The scene in which Ferguson scratches his head over the intricacies of the infamously arcane eight-legged essay, for example, put me in mind of the mock xenophobia of Karl Pilkington in Ricky's Gervais's An Idiot Abroad (these Chinese, you see, are just so darned inscrutable...).

Exploring the forces that have held China together as a nation over the past two thousand years, Ferguson finds the answer in autocracy. From China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, to the present, Chinese rulers have sought to stave off the threat of dòng luàn (turmoil) with the iron fist of repression. Yet autocracy, Ferguson believes, is antithetical to the smooth functioning of ‘free market’ democratic capitalism and the liberties it supposedly underwrites. Indeed, like an ideological Cold Warrior from the 1950s, Ferguson worries that the ‘individual freedom’ supposedly enjoyed in the West (you really do need to get out of that ivory tower, Niall) has too often been denied to Chinese people by their dictatorial leaders.

Ferguson is, of course, quite right to worry about the lack of freedom (not to mention outright oppression) experienced by ordinary people in China. But he does not explain how the existence of two or three almost identical political parties – the democratic façade of Western capitalist states – constitutes a political advance over China’s one-party system. And he overlooks the simple fact that the reproduction of the profit system depends precisely on autocracy: no democratic polity would last a day unless it was safeguarded by a dictatorship equipped with an arsenal of ideological and repressive apparatuses of surveillance and control.

The other elephant - or perhaps giant panda - in the room is the exploitative nature of capitalism. Whatever freedom capitalism may have brought to the ruling classes of the West, the economies of capitalist states are based on wage slavery and imperialist wars (such as the recent invasion of Iraq, which was endorsed by Ferguson). In fact, it is only by ending wage slavery that the majority of human beings will be able to enjoy the freedom Ferguson extols.

In the second episode (‘Maostalgia’), Ferguson meets groups of Chinese citizens dedicated to the celebration of Chairman Mao. The professor is perplexed. Visiting a restaurant whose patrons indulge in songs and dances with a Cultural Revolution theme, he turns in open-mouthed astonishment to the camera, noting breathlessly that:

"I’ve never seen anything crazier than that in my life. It’s just surreal. It’s as if you walked into a German restaurant and saw everybody standing on the chairs singing the Horst Wessel Song and waving swastikas! Or if you went into a restaurant in Moscow and everybody was dressed up as Stalin or gulag guards […] Just take a look at this madness!"

Ferguson refers repeatedly to the ‘airbrushed’ nature of official history in China. ‘In the case of Mao’, he notes disapprovingly, ‘there’s a huge difference between the man and the myth’. Ferguson has a point here. It is perhaps surprising that the man responsible for so much chaos and death and who spoke of 'painting portraits on the blank canvas of the people' should be feted as a hero of the people. But while many older Chinese people have little nostalgia for Maoism, Mao is a useful channel for nationalist ideology in contemporary China. The official line in China is that Mao was '70% right and 30% wrong' (the Great Helmsman dropped the ball with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution) and the Chinese leadership understands that presenting a continuity between contemporary and Mao-era China helps to bind the Chinese people to their nation and their leadership - and papers over the appalling and widening gap between rich and poor. In recent years, even Chiang Kai-shek, Mao's arch enemy and once an officially reviled figure, had been rehabilitated as a national hero for his role in resisting the Japanese.

In any case, one needn’t travel to China to find such a dichotomy between reputation and reality. After all, in the land of Ferguson’s birth, Winston Churchill – a racist warmonger and a mass murderer – is today revered by many, including the overwhelming majority of the British ruling class, as a hero. Airbrushing is a something of a feature of capitalist propaganda and is hardly exclusive to China.

Ferguson cannot understand why nobody he meets in China is prepared to acknowledge the contradiction inherent in their belief that Mao, whom he calls a ‘hardline Communist’, is the father of capitalist China – and his incomprehension on this point reveals profound historical and political confusions. Ferguson believes that China was – and to a certain extent remains – ‘communist’ and that Maoism represented a disastrous departure from capitalism. In fact, however, Maoism arose only after the proletarian movement of the 1920s had been drowned in the blood of the Shanghai working class. The Maoist 'communism’ which Ferguson believes underpinned the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution was nothing of the sort (you don't become a communist just by calling yourself one, any more than I can become Paris Hilton simply by changing my name to hers). The working class played no part whatsoever in Mao's 'revolution'. Rather, Maoism was a variant of Stalinism which concretised itself as a form of state capitalism (Ferguson himself acknowledges that Mao replaced the old ruling class with a new one). The notion that Mao's totalitarianism had something to do with communism is as laughable as it is mythical, however much it has become a commonplace of bourgeois historiography.

Ferguson’s is a simple but effective strategy of attributing the horrors of China’s capitalist past to ‘communism’. This is, appropriately enough, a version of the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy: capitalism, Ferguson asserts, brings freedom – so if Maoism led to catastrophe, well, then it must have been something else. And that’s not all. While Ferguson busily denounces the madness of Maoism, he says almost nothing about the horrors of capitalism – both East and West – today. That looks like airbrushing to me, Niall.

In the third episode, Ferguson turns to the military situation, worrying that the growing military power of the Chinese state and the increasing nationalism of the Chinese population might be exploited by the Chinese in the event of a slowdown in domestic growth. Again, so far as it goes, this is a reasonable point to make and it is one that has been echoed by Marxist commentators on China. In fact, nationalist sentiment in China is regularly stoked in the media - as, for example, in the ongoing multilateral dispute over the Spratly Islands. But it is important to put this into geopolitical perspective: it is the US - not China - that has by far the largest and most belligerent military presence in the world and the US is currently increasing its activity in the Pacific as part of its 'return to Asia' policy.

Ferguson also takes a look at cyber-activism among Chinese nationalists and meets the members of the notorious anti-CNN group, whose work raises concerns about Sinophobia in Western media. The points raised by activists such as anti-CNN are haughtily dismissed by Ferguson; but they are rooted in reality. Anti-Chinese sentiment is a widespread feature of Western media coverage of China, as the reporting of the Tibet protests and the Olympic flame incidents in 2008 attests. In fact, Ferguson's own documentary is itself just the latest in a growing number of rather one-sided media representations of China - representations which, taken together, reflect a huge nervousness among Western elites about the global economic influence and growing military might of China.

Emir Kusturica once said that 'one frame of a Ken Loach film is worth more [...] than the entire Hollywood output of the last 15 years'. It's hard to disagree with that, and if I wasn't opposed in principle to all expressions of patriotism, I'd call Ken Loach a national treasure. Since the 1960s, Loach's documentaries and dramas have uncompromisingly and movingly depicted the struggles of working class people in Britain and made a major contribution to socialist cinema in the UK.

On Monday evening, Loach introduced a panel discussion on the politics of documentary censorship at the British Film Institute. The audience watched some extracts from Loach's four-part 1983 documentary A Question of Leadership, a film made for Channel 4 which exposed the complicity of the unions in strangling a variety of industrial disputes. The film also gave a voice to rank and file union members and exposed the machiavellianism of union leaders. As Loach himself commented, the film aired arguments that simply were not - and still are not - ever heard in the mainstream media. It was therefore almost inevitable that the documentary would not be broadcast.

After the screening, Loach was joined onstage by Brunel University's Julian Petley (who has written about the censorship of Loach's film) and Jo Glanville of the Index on Censorship to discuss the process by which the broadcasting of the film was prevented. As Petley observed, a variety of legal machinations and delaying tactics were used to kick Loach's film into the long grass. The board of the regulator, the Independent Broadcasting Authority, was stacked with members of the SDP (for non-Brits: a short-lived 'centrist' party formed by right-wing ex-Labourites). Indeed, as Loach wrote in The Guardian at the time:

"Television institutions are dominated by political appointments. Edmund Dell, chairman of Channel 4, and George Thomson, chairman of IBA, are both ex-Labour ministers. Dell is now in the SDP. They are in television to do a political job, to make sure that this most powerful of medium reflects, by and large, the interests of the establishment."

Of Loach's four original films for the documentary, it was originally proposed that only three should shown; but eventually none were broadcast. The viewpoints heard in Loach's film, it was claimed, were 'unrepresentative', meaning, as Petley explained, that they were not views usually heard in the media. Thus the very fact that the views were marginal was used further to suppress them! Loach's documentary, said the regulator, needed to be 'balanced' by other films offering alternative views; but as Petley observed, Loach's film was the balance, since its arguments were not to be heard anywhere else in the media. Loach's opponents also slowed down and confused the legal process by shifting the grounds of criticism from suggestions of partiality to allegations of defamation.

Overall, the screening and discussion provided a valuable insight into political censorship in the UK at a time of enormous political and social volatility. Yet the issues discussed have hardly gone away. Working class political perspectives remain more or less absent from broadcast journalism - and the situation is worsening rather than improving. As Petley suggested, the sharpening of commercial imperatives in British broadcasting following the Broadcasting Act of 1990 has made politically challenging television journalism harder than ever to produce.

The event got me thinking about the representation of the working class on British television in general. Working class people appear all the time in factual and fictional television programmes (although they are frequently depicted in popular televison programmes as feckless and work-shy, as discussed by me here). But working class political positions are another thing altogether. Perhaps it is useful here to distinguish between the working class, understood in sociological terms as a category or identity to be represented, and the proletariat - Marx's 'class for itself'. What was so scandalous to the ruling class about Loach's work in the early 1980s is precisely what gives politicians, union leaders and television producers the shivers today: the voicing of proletarian perspectives that defy the logic of 'representation' in defence of working class interests.

TV say if you’re poor, you must be slow and shiftless / But you pay ’em to say that so we don’t want it different – The Coup, ‘Lazymuthafucka’

The dreams have no dream - Adorno, Minima Moralia

This blog tends to focus on the propaganda function of contemporary news and current affairs media (that is, after all, where the biggest lies are to be found). Yet popular media formats also help to sustain capitalist hegemony. A brief consideration of some of the themes and concerns of contemporary lifestyle and reality television will help to illustrate how class-based discourses are diffused through popular culture.

Gilles Deleuze proposed that developed capitalist societies transitioned in the course of the twentieth century from ‘disciplinary societies’, in which capitalists manage workers through physical discipline and institutions, to ‘societies of control’, in which individuals voluntarily internalise the interests of their rulers. In the society of control, the media – and in particular the ‘domestic’ medium of television – play a major role in constituting us as capitalist subjects by manufacturing a social consensus based on bourgeois values. In 1962, in the wake of the Pilkington Report into the quality of British television, Raymond Williams noted in his article ‘Television in Britain’ that ‘majority television’ was ‘outstandingly an expression of the false consciousness of our particular societies’. Williams’s judgement remains eminently applicable to popular television today. In The Apprentice, contestants compete against one another for an internship with a business mogul, while in Dragon’s Den and High Street Dreams, ordinary members of the public seek to impress businesspeople and financiers with their entrepreneurial acumen. Other programmes fetishize the acquisition of houses (tellingly called ‘properties’ in lifestyle television-speak), while television programmes about obesity, exercise, cosmetic surgery and dieting encourage viewers to focus their attentions on their personal well-being and appearance. Indeed, the proliferation of ‘transformational’ reality television programmes in recent years – from home improvement shows to makeover programmes – reflect and reinforce a profound investment in disciplinary work and biopolitical self-regulation. In such programmes, as Adorno observed of contemporary capitalist society in Minima Moralia, ‘everybody must have projects all the time’, so that ‘the whole of life must look like a job’.

Such television programming also interpellates working class people as self-contained units of production and consumption, fostering what the Marxist writer Christopher Caudwell liked to call the ‘bourgeois illusion’ of individualism. Little wonder that so many people today believe that human beings are ‘naturally’ selfish – a proposition that has been refuted by scientists from Peter Kropotkin to Stephen Jay Gould – and that this supposed ‘fact’ precludes the possibility of communism. (It might be noted here that even if human nature were essentially characterised by selfishness, this would constitute an argument not against communism but in favourof it, since the fact of human selfishness would necessitate reciprocal social arrangements capable of preventing the exploitation of some human beings by others).

The entrenched individualism of these popular television programmes tends to vitiate any sense that the problems faced by working class people and communities can be overcome collectively. In each episode of Channel 4’s reality programme The Secret Millionaire, an undercover millionaire encounters several community-minded individuals, each with their own project designed to help a disadvantaged group of people. At the end of the episode, the millionaire reveals her identity, writing a cheque for one or more of the deserving causes she has encountered. Here, as in Slavoj Žižek’s ‘chocolate laxative’ paradigm, capitalism is posited as the remedy for the very problems it has caused. Channel 4’s How the Other Half Live operates on a similar premise: a wealthy family donates money to a poorer one, having first ensured that its members are deserving of support. In programmes such as these, working class people are urged to ‘better themselves’ through hard work. This in turn tends to deny agency to the working class as a class, implying that complex social problems can be rectified not by the collective action of the workers against their exploiters, but by a combination of individual effort and perhaps, for a lucky few, thedeus ex machina of benevolent philanthropic intervention – a proposition that chimes with the emphasis placed upon private charity in the Cameronian one nation fantasy of the ‘Big Society’. As for collectivity, we are left with the ersatz participation of the X Factor phone-in.

The radical critique of ‘reality’, ‘aspirational’ and lifestyle television formats should in no way involve a moralistic objection to consumerism; after all, in contrast with the gloomy ressentiment and anti-consumerism of left-liberal politics, the communist demand is nothing if not a demand for more. The criticism is rather that lifestyle television’s exhortations to social mobility and consumerism serve to occlude both the reality of exploitation and the potential for collective socio-political action. They also disregard the increasing poverty of the working class. As the ‘wealth gap’ widens and social mobility rates stagnate, average wages and living standards for workers in ‘developed’ capitalist societies have fallen in recent years, as even the capitalist news media are sometimes compelled to acknowledge.

The increasingly fragile fantasy of upward mobility finds expression in many other popular media forms today. It is a convention of hip-hop videos, for example, to be set dually ‘on the street’ and ‘at the mansion’. In the dream-like logic of the music video, celebrity rappers transition effortlessly between these two settings. Association with ‘the street’ allows even the most sybaritic celebrities to maintain a reputation as ‘authentic’, ‘real’ and ‘cool’. The mythologisation of easy social advancement, meanwhile, furnishes an aspirational ideal while eliding the economic constraints that preclude social mobility for the majority of people in the real world. As such examples suggest – and as any advertising executive knows – capitalist hegemony is maintained not only through the assertion of nationalist symbolism and state propaganda, but also through the reconfiguration of human dreams, desires, aspirations and emotions.

As well as encouraging individualism and voluntarism, many popular media forms ridicule of working class people who attain media prominence: witness the outpouring of class hatred in tabloid television’s treatment of working class – especially female – ‘chav’ or ‘white trash’ celebrities, such as Jade Goody, Kerry Katona and Britney Spears, who are often censured for their emotional instability, stupidity, vulgarity, corpulence or maternal incompetence. It is precisely such undisciplined and recalcitrant working class people that the experts and gurus of ‘rehab’ reality television aim to instruct in the virtues of self-restraint and hard work. In BBC3’s Young, Dumb and Living Off Mum, young working class people are mocked for their indolence and cajoled into taking low-paid, service sector jobs. In Channel 4’s Benefit Busters and The Fairy Jobmother, meanwhile, presenter Hayley Taylor mobilises a mixture of moral censure and therapeutic rhetoric in an attempt to wean working class families ‘off benefits’ and ‘into work’ – as though unemployment were, to use the phrase of the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, a ‘lifestyle choice’.

But it is perhaps in the treatment of crime that the anti-working class nature of these popular media formats is most evident. The police force is all but venerated in reality television documentaries, while working class criminals, from violent gangs to ‘hoodies’ and ‘chavs’ are excoriated in the news media and in television docusoaps such as Bravo channel’s Street Crime UK and its replacement Brit Cops. And while largely juvenile, anti-social crime does constitute a genuine blight on society (one whose impact is felt most keenly in working class communities), what Marcuse termed ‘the mature delinquency’ of the ruling class – such as brutal invasions and bombings, lethal sanctions on food and medicines, health and safety violations – are either simply not classified as crimes or ignored; indeed, corporate and political crimes barely feature in crime-related television programming. The truth is that the most pernicious and chronic threats to the well-being of working class people are posed not by other workers, but by what Žižek calls the ‘objective’ or systemic violence of capitalist social relations, which finds expression in work-related ‘accidents’, poverty, ‘stress’, environmental damage, genocide and warfare. But there’s not much entertainment value in discussing any of that.