As Team GB entered the Olympic stadium during the opening ceremony on Friday night, it was to David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. The central line from the song struck me as summing up the country’s hopes for its sportswomen and men amid a double-dip recession and seemingly terminal economic inertia - ‘We can be heroes, just for one day’. A concession in the choice of song perhaps that the Olympics represent a temporary, if somewhat spectacular, distraction from an increasingly dire reality that can only intensify over the forthcoming years.
Something of a debate has broken out about the meaning of this extraordinary ceremony, not least here on OurKingdom with Anthony Barnett and Sunder Katwala. The New York Times called it “...neither a nostalgic sweep through the past nor a bold vision of a brave new future”. This struck me as an accurate summation of an event that presented in microcosm the present historical moment in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the social and economic malaise that has followed. I was reminded of the quote by Antonio Gramsci on crisis in its consisting“...precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot yet be born”. It is similar sentiments that informed the mixed nature of London's opening ceremony, which looked neither wholly forward nor back.
That is not to say that Boyle’s efforts were without deeper meaning or any sustained attempt at social and historical critique. In particular, the first section of the opening ceremony offered a reflective and frequently epic expression of the Industrial Revolution.
At the outset of this first movement, the audience is offered a glimpse of ‘Merrie England’, a pre-industrial idyll resplendent with maypoles and games. Amid these scenes we hear four songs representing the formation of the British state, whose constituent nations have their hymns consecutively sung. This begins with a lone child singing William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’, presumably to represent agrarian England. This isfollowed by ‘Danny Boy’ representing Ulster and what remains of the British conquest in Ireland; next, ‘Flower of Scotland’ and the Welsh song ‘Bread of Heaven’ (sung in English). These songs represent the political constitution of Britain - the conquest of Wales, the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707, and finally union with Ireland in 1801. Shortly thereafter, ‘Jerusalem’ resumes once more, now sung in unison by a choir - representing both the culmination of the political project of state formation, and a sense of foreboding as the ‘satanic mills’ of industrialisation appear on the horizon of history.
Political union now complete, the engineer Isambard Brunel, played by Kenneth Branagh, leads a group of industrialists from a set of carriages that have entered the arena to the foot of a small hill that represents Glastonbury Tor, where he then proceeds to read from Caliban’s ‘Be Not Afeard’ speech, from Shakespeare’s Tempest.
It is the conclusion of this speech by Brunel that initiates an incredibly carnal depiction of the Industrial Revolution. An impressive percussive performance, led by a Boudicca-like Dame Evelynn Glennie, gradually builds, winding up into a coiled mass of energy as the first industrial ‘workers’ begin to emerge from within the Glastonbury Tor, a new subject unseen in human history until this moment. Brunel’s industrialists, having stayed at the foot of the Tor, remain stoical in manner as they observe ‘their’ creation, the industrial proletariat, as it emerges from the womb of a more ingenuous land, now gone. Boyle wishes to tell us that this is a seismic moment, both in the history of these islands and also, our species.
The percussion builds, coming to imitate a piston engine or the constant velocity of a locomotive train. Meanwhile, the landscape proceeds to rapidly change from the ‘green and pleasant land’ of Jerusalem to Blake’s ‘Satanic Mills’ and, in front of our eyes, the island of John Constable is replaced with that of Joseph Wright of Derby. The combination of the percussion and the chanting provides a pagan drive to this transformation, as if industrialisation itself expresses the basis of some new religion. This section is entitled ‘Pandemonium’, the name of John Milton’s capital of hell in ‘Paradise Lost’; the choice of title illustrates Boyle’s own critique of the new faith. Surely only the zeal of ‘divinely’ inspired constancy can drive, mediate and intensify such purposeful chaos? Yet this does not seem the devil’s work, nor are the industrialists located as uniquely malevolent protagonists within the allegory. Indeed, amid all this turmoil, Brunel’s industrialists stare at the creations of the new civilisation in astonishment as though these ziggurats of industry had appeared by magic from the heart of the Earth, greater symbols and more indomitable successors than that totem of the previous pagan faith, the now recedent Glastonbury Tor.
Watching the performance of the industrialists brings to mind Marx, when he writes in the ‘Communist Manifesto’ how capitalism represents:
“...a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, it (the bourgeoisie) is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
Boyle’s capitalists and their collective reaction to the changes in their surroundings evoke the spirit of Marx’s words here - they are unleashing forces of history but don’t yet know where these forces may lead them.
What does not quite fit, however, is the non-antagonistic nature of the relationship between the industrialists and the workers. The performance depicts it as one of a partnership, an archaic corporatism assiduously intent on increasing the productive capabilities of the nation, of capital and of the human species.
In truth, when those workers did figuratively descend from Glastonbury Tor - or to put it literally, began to engage in industrial forms of production - what happened? There was the insurrection of Luddism in Nottinghamshire and then Derbyshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire and Leicestershire, which ultimately had to be pacified by 12,000 soldiers - more troops than were fighting Napoleonic France at the time (1812). Later, there were the Swing Riots of the 1830s, which were overwhelmingly the result of the progressive impoverishment and dispossession of the English peasantry over the previous fifty years. They were also the direct result, according to Lord Carnarvon, of English agricultural labourers being ‘reduced to a plight more abject than that of any race in Europe’. This experience, of worker resistance and dispossession from common land, as well as state repression, is wholly missing from Boyle’s ‘People’s’ history.
Nor is the relationship of the workers to their work particularly representative of historical fact. This feels particularly pertinent at around twenty four minutes through the ceremony when, having quite literally forged an Olympic ring to join the other four already suspended above their heads, the workers and industrialists collectively stand in awe at the sight of their combined achievement. Such a relationship to work in industrial production did not exist and is precisely what distinguishes it from pre-industrial forms of artisanal labour, in so much as workers produced things for exchange value within the new system and are not afforded the possibility of viewing a commodity as the conclusion of ‘their’ labour, as the very division of such labour grows ever more sophisticated in the process of transition.
Work under capitalism in general, and in particular within industrial society, is alienating - which is to say one rarely understands what one is actually doing. A good example of this can be found in the film ‘The Working Class Goes to Heaven’, when the protagonist and piece-work operator, Lulu, becomes enraged at realising he doesn’t even know what the components he produces every day are for. This is a more accurate depiction of the relationship of the worker to their work than the rhythmic and satisfying encomium that Boyle offers.
Boyle seems to think of industrial production and the ‘society of work’ as offering the possibility of producing things of ethical and spiritual significance and perhaps even of redemption. The rings do, after all, hang over the heads of both classes, the workers and the bourgeoisie, as if they were some transcendent god or spiritual ideal. Here is a higher value which they have created through work and which now stands above them. Historically, it could perhaps represent socialism, an ethical ideal formed from class solidarity. Or perhaps the idea (misplaced, in my view) of collective contribution to a purported national interest or human progress. Whatever it is, the collective labours of these men and women seem to attain spiritual significance. Boyle's elision of suffering and alienation is a kind of post-industrial erasure of the historical experience of industrial society.
For the most part, all that work represents within industrial production is that the living human subject is rendered subordinate to the commodity object. Marx calls this the ‘ontological inversion’, where humans are reduced to the ‘object’ of commodity labour while the things they produce for exchange are imbued with the metaphysics of life and ‘subjecthood’. While there are some jobs that permit a sense of craftsmanship or achievement, such as the construction of the ‘majestic’ fixed capital of bridges, boats and buildings, the reality of work under industrial capitalism is mostly more akin to those workers of Guangdong in China who are manufacturing the Wenlock and Mandeville toys for the Olympic Games. These workers were forced to work as much as 120 hours a month overtime in the run up to the Games, while being paid as little as 26p an hour for working an 11-and-a-half hour day. Such work is not noble, honourable or creative. It is dull, repetitive and banal - as this Luddite poem from 1812 makes perfectly clear. The same reality of work, although by now of differing degree to that in South and East Asia, remains true almost two centuries later in the UK as is clear for those cleaners housed in temporary ‘slums’ on the periphery of the Olympic Park.
As they look upon the fruits of their work, this is not the relationship Boyle’s 'workers' have to the Olympic Rings they have forged.
