How welfare supports the 'gig economy'

Last Friday, I was sent to a jobs fair by my work coach. The fair was at another job centre a short bus ride away. There, the claimants waited patiently, and some impatiently, to speak with seated representatives of various companies and public bodies. I found long queues for the local council — offering admin jobs and other opportunities — and nonexistent queues for tutoring and personal training (I went for the former).

Apart from admin roles, tutoring and personal training, the fair had desks for construction work, retail, catering, even health and social care. Names of brands caught my eye: Westfield, Nando’s and Tesco. It got me wondering. How much of this is about what the employers want? Take a guess. Here we are, the reserve army of labour, queuing to sell our time and our skills to would-be employers. Is this really what the unemployed need?

Of course, there was a catch: if I failed to attend the jobs fair, I would face the possibility of my benefits being slashed to £10 a week for up to 90 days. This is what’s called a ‘sanction’. Once at the fair, you queue to talk to the reps, sign up in the hope of an interview and they sign you off for having applied for a job. It’s unclear how much of this is about paper-shuffling. A cynic would suspect quite a lot.

However, this is not a worry in itself. I suppose some people may find a job this way, and I might even be starting out in some temporary arrangement. But it is an example of something else. The work coaches are eager to get claimants to sign up for agency work, which will provide temporary employment and sometimes ‘self-employed’ or ‘free-lance’ contracts. I’ve worked these before. It can leave you at the beck and call of a company.

If you’re on Universal Credit and working you can keep 35p for every pound you make. That’s £35 for every £100 (in theory). I’ve yet to find out if this system works (in practice), but it sounds like it could serve as a transition back to full-time work. It’s meant to ‘wean’ the claimant off of the public teat. So you re-enter the labour market and never return. This may help reduce the official figures of unemployed too.

There is an industry in waiting for the jobless. The ‘gig economy’ — so-called for its offer of work on ‘self-employed’ contracts, such as Deliveroo andUber— is eager to gobble up cheap labour. These types of flexible contracts leave workers with their rights undermined, including the minimum wage, sick pay and holidays. It shows just how fragile these protections have become. And maybe this is why unemployment is officially falling.

At the time of writing, unemployment stands at 4.8% and, at least on paper, the UK has reached an employment level of 73%. This is the highest since records began in the early 1970s. Naturally, Tories like Toby Young love to play this up as an achievement for the right. Yet the lowest unemployment rate on record was at 3.4% in 1973. Those were the days when governments aimed for ‘full employment’.

Although employment is officially high, real wages have fallen by more than 10% in less than a decade. The TUC found that the wages have continued to stagnate, leading to a fall of 10.4% from 2007 to 2015. The UK is now alongside Greece in terms of shit pay for a hard day’s work. Even Poland has seen real wages increase by more than Britain. Meanwhile the super-rich continue to pig-out, with their salaries hitting £5.5 million.

It looks like the job centres are pushing claimants into short-term, low paid jobs — only for them to be kept on a lower rate of benefits. The government gets to say unemployment is falling, while the reasons for people falling out of work are worse than ever. As we’ve established, Universal Credit isn’t much of a cushion to land on, especially with the ‘sanctions’ regime of benefits. No wonder most people would rather be rinsed by the ‘gig economy’.

This article was originally published at Notes from the Underclass.

Beyond Liberation.

Today we find class politics are all too readily dismissed, and suspiciously so, in the decades since the fall of Communism. Instead it was the newly emergent identity politics which took hold at the wake of socialism’s funeral. In the era of political-correctness we find class politics missing from the discussion, only for its space to be filled by identity – whether it is gender, sexuality or race – in ways which couldn’t possibly threaten the prevailing order. But this isn’t the end of the story. It was Christopher Hitchens who once remarked that “Socialism has been to its own funeral more often than Tom Sawyer.” We may find if we are so inclined, that the majority of the working-class in world terms is female. If class may be abolished through the culmination of the class struggle, then it may be possible to overcome other forms of domination.

This has been the case for a lot longer than we might like to admit. The term ‘proletariat’ is actually derived from the Latin for ‘offspring’ which refers to those who were too poor to serve the state with anything other than their wombs. It denotes to a specific swathe of the masses in the Roman Republic. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children (who would then be reared by the state as soldiers and sent into battle). What society demanded from them was not production but reproduction. The proletariat started life among those outside the labour process and not from within it. The labour these women endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders.

In the post-industrial capitalist societies we find that the service sector staffed by vast numbers of women has expanded enormously. And of course, there are those women who have made it in the financial sector – but they are not the proletarians and have little stake in a class-conscious feminism. Even when Britain was the workshop of the world the industrial working-class were outnumbered by domestic servants and agricultural labourers. The sweatshops of the developing world are packed to the brim with female workers, both young and old. And so, we find the politics of class and identity can converge on common material conditions.

The journalist Germaine Greer takes the notion of women's liberation as more than equality, as the achievement of formal equality would mean equality with unfree men and that's hardly emancipation. Liberation from constraints on divorce, abortion, jobs and income are not the end but the beginning. The case of recognising the raising of children and even housekeeping as work with a living wage is an example of what Greer is talking about. Venezuela has gone one step further this year and put aside pensions for full-time mums. This is a much more radical proposal than quotas for women in board rooms, which would just give rise to a few more Thatcheresque women in Greer’s terms. As Lindsey German has written “The talk of glass ceilings and unfairly low bonuses for women bankers misses the point about liberation, which is that it has to be for all working women and not just a tiny number of privileged women.”

Under capitalist conditions the wage a woman receives as a sex worker or indeed a performer in pornography is no different than the wage received by a waitress. Not in the narrow sense that the rate of pay is the same per hour, but rather in the sense that in each case the worker’s labour is still exchanged for a wage. The labour contributed remains disproportionate to the wage received in order to guarantee profitability. It’s about the extraction and the accumulation of profit on the backs of other people’s labour. The advocates of decriminalisation should take note that the content of the labour is not what matters in a society where free-choice and markets prevail. Indeed, in a society of free-choice sex work would be an option among many. A moralising ban on pornography and prostitution seems somewhat futile in light of this. It misses the point.

Objectification is a part of capitalist society; it is a part of the productive process, with the role of wage labour and the commodities resulting from it. Being paid for sex is no different than being paid to smile as a waitress. Wage labour is not a category with any moral precepts or implications, it is merely functional. It's not immoral as much as amoral, relativist and pragmatic. The moves by David Cameron to impose an ‘opt-in’ mechanism over the internet inflow of pornography are contrary to the thrust of a market society. It often seems as though Conservatives want to unleash all of us to the freedom to fail, at least when it comes to the economy. Yet when it comes to social questions the Right wade into our personal lives in order to reassert ‘traditional values’ over us.

The case for feminism has to be made from the ground up, the same with socialism, beginning with the conditions already prevalent in society. In this way we can see that there is a point of divergence between the feminist mission and the structure of capitalist society insofar as the objectives crash against the pillars of market ideology. This may be a terrifying prospect for middle-class liberal feminists, but it’s the way it should be. Women can't just be as free as unfree men. The attainment of civil rights and liberties is only the end of one kind of struggle, which is certainly not at odds with class society and the capitalist system. It’s the aim of human emancipation, not mere liberation under capitalism, to which this cause must be welded.

Originally written by Ellie Crowe and JT White on August 10th 2013 for Pulse.

Death to Slavery.

Below I have reproduced the letter Marx and Engels wrote to President Lincoln upon his re-election in late 1864. The letter was signed by every member of the International Workingmen's Association (the First International) and was originally printed in The Bee Hive in January 7th 1865 just months before Lincoln was assassinated. Beneath the next photograph, I have reproduced Marx's letter to Lincoln's successor President Andrew Johnson.

    To Abraham Lincoln,
    President of the United States of America.
    Sir: - We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war-cry of your re-election is, Death to Slavery.
    From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?
    When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, 'slavery' on the banner of armed revolt; when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great democratic republic had first sprung up, whence the first declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counter-revolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old Constitution," and maintained "slavery to be a beneficent institution, indeed the only solution of the great problem of the relation of labor to capital," and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice"; then the working-classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper-classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the pro-slavery intervention, importunities of their "betters," and form most parts of Europe contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.
    While the workingmen, the true political power of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic; while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned labourer to sell himself and choose his own master; they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation, but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.
    The workingmen of Europe feel sure that as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle-class, so the American anti-slavery War will do for the working-classes. They consider if an earnest of the epoch to come, that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working-class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

 

 

    To Andrew Johnson,
    President of the United States.
    Sir:
    The demon of the "peculiar institution," for the supremacy of which the South rose in arms, would not allow his worshippers to honourably succumb on the open field. What he had begun in treason he must needs end in infamy. As Philip II.'s war for the Inquisition bred a Gerard, thus Jefferson Davis' pro-slavery war a Booth.
    It is not our part to call words of sorrow and horror, while the year after year, and day by day, stuck to their Sisyphus work of morally assassinating Abraham Lincoln and the great republic he headed stand now aghast at this universal outburst of popular feeling, and rival with each other to strew rhetorical flowers on his open grave. They have now at last found out that he was a man neither to be browbeaten by adversity nor intoxicated by success, inflexibly pressing on to his great goal, never compromising it by blind haste, slowly maturing his steps, never retracing them, carried away by no surge of popular favour, disheartened by no slackening of the popular pulse, tempering stern acts by the gleams of a kind heart, illuminating scenes dark with passion by the smile of humour, doing his titanic work as humbly and homely as heaven-born rulers do little things with the grandiloquence of pomp and state; in one word, one of the rare men who succeed in becoming great without ceasing to be good. Such, indeed, was the modesty of this great and good man that the world only discovered him a hero after he had fallen a martyr.
    To be singled out by the side of such a chief, the second victim to the infernal gods of slavery, was an honour due to Mr Seward. Had he not, at a time of general hesitation, the sagacity to foresee and the manliness to foretell "the irrepressible conflict"? Did he not, in the darkest hours of that conflict, prove true to the Roman duty to never despair of the republic and its star? We earnestly hope that he and his son will be restored to health, public activity, and well-deserved honours within much less than "90 days."
    After a tremendous war, but which, if we consider its vast dimensions, and its broad scope, and compare it to the Old World's Hundred Years' War, and Thirty Years' Wars, and Twenty-Three Years' Wars, can hardly be said to have lasted 90 days, yours, Sir, has become the task to uproot by the law what has been felled by the sword, to preside over the arduous work of political reconstruction and social regeneration. A profound sense of your great mission will save you from any compromise with stern duties. You will never forget that to initiate the new era of the emancipation of labour, the American people devolved the responsibilities of leadership upon two men of labour - the one Abraham Lincoln, the other Andrew Johnson.

Did you swim here?! Did you swim here?!

I was recently invited to an anarcho-primitivist talk with John Zerzan as speaker by my friend Marmaduke Hutchings. It was packed out with around 120 to 130 people going on my own estimations. It also became apparent that this crowd were already won over and weren’t here to pick a fight with Zerzan. The talk was at Raven’s Row near Spitalfields, there some of his books as well as t-shirt slogans and videos exploring primitivism were on show. After the talk there was food and booze available to the audience. God knows who bankrolls that place. It would be a lively discussion that night. The questions and answers opening featured talk of the ‘proto-fascist’ Batman movie and suggestions that the victims of the recent shooting were really ideologically complicit in the ‘proto-fascistic’ regime. It should be noted that Zerzan didn’t endorse this position. At one point the discussion was derailed over the topic of drug consumption, which culminated with a statement to the effect that “Although koalas are addicted to eucalyptus, they don’t commit genocide.”

 

The height of hilarity was when John recalled the culmination of a questions and answers session that took the form of a man yelling at him "Did you swim here?! Did you swim here?!" The initial emphasis of the talk was on community and its notable absence in our world before making it clear that we don’t want the ‘old hell’ of patriarchal domination and hierarchical control. Rather we want the ‘new hell’ which would be a prelapsarian organic whole of individuals set free from all the old forms of domination and power. The problem here is that there isn’t really a beginning. You can trace these problems to domestication, but then you could trace the roots of domestication back even further. Ultimately you could end up with the view that it is the human race that’s the problem. So we should enjoy the ride and await the end with the knowledge that there will be a great beginning after man. There is nothing that can be done about the fundamental condition of humanity, which we are really just rapacious homonidesand nothing can be made of us.

 

 

You can easily see where the conservative ethos of John Gray would clamber into bed with the nihilistic poetry of Charles Bukowski. Of course, Zerzan stresses that he isn’t a ‘collapsist’ who’ll be singing in a meadow while it all falls down. But it is easier to dream of tearing it all down than overthrowing one system for another. When it got topical as Zerzan took up the Batman shootings as an example. Noting the same old songs, the two primary responses in the narrative around the shooting were that the killer is simply evil or that there are too many guns in America. But the US has always been full of guns and there hasn’t always been these shootings, he notes, the same goes for violent psychos. The almost recreational violence and mass-killing must be a social phenomenon, a symptom of the technological society where there are more shootings than elsewhere. This isn’t particularly insightful, as the most violence can be pinned down to where there is a high concentration of available firearms, political fear and social alienation.

 

It’s the techno-culture stupid! It’s ideological and not neutral in any sense. The rolling back of cultural solidarity comes at the same time that the technological ideology pitches its universal solution. It will connect each of us, but it actually helps to atomise us. It promises us a better world and reduces us to passive appendages of machines. We are increasingly inert in our reliance on GPS systems, the internet and mobile phones. In Japan you can buy bathing machines which close over you like a coffin. In South Korea there is robotic teaching, hugging and even French-kissing. He could’ve included the sex doll craze in Japan, that there are many men who prefer fake women that they can keep in the boot of their car to real women. We’re at the end of sensual experience.In the background of the problems which plague our civilisation Zerzan sees technological domestication at the root of it all: overpopulation and environmental degradation as well as drugs and disease. According to this view industrialisation generates cancer and other diseases.

It’s not just that domestication removes us from what used to be ordinary aspects of human life. He notes that America is an over-drugged society where it has gotten to the point that the drugs can actually be detected in the water supply. There are 80 million Americans with sleeping disorders, tens of millions using drugs to get through the day.In the same vein industrialisation coupled with domestication that the problem of overpopulation came about. The advent of agriculture was the beginning of this. It was the mistake to go from taking what nature gave to us for free to attempts of controlling and engineering nature. When confronted the horrors of pre-civilisation Zerzan maintains that cannibalism, head-hunting and genital mutilation are all products of domestication. He knew Freud’s writing on civilisation in the aftermath of war, that the civilisation is a construct for regulating the suppressed forces of violent sexual urges inside us. Domestication is a wound that never heals, it’s a machine for happiness that creates unhappiness.

According to this view private property emerges from domestication, John Zerzan contrasts himself against the Marxists here. He skips over the materialist reading of history, that the productive modes of exploitation create the pre-conditions for the next stage. In this way slavery and feudalism created the necessary conditions for capitalism to emerge, in turn capitalism may lead to socialism. Zerzan would probably reject this as another notion of technological progress, for him every political project is reducible to this fetish for technology. But it seems as though Zerzan, to some extent, wants technology without technology as he claims that there are other ways of powering respiratory machines than the systems we fall back on today. His example of electricity generated through cycling. At the same time it could be said that the anarcho-primitivism to which Zerzan subscribes really falls into the ease with which we can imagine the collapse of our entire world than it is to foresee a post-capitalist future.

In the same way that Zerzan dismissed the ‘same song’ of the American narrative around shootings to differentiate his position from conservatives and liberals he made time to distinguish himself from the other factions of the Left. Even though Zerzan may not see himself as a man of the Left, it is the case that the anarchist tradition comes out of 18^th Century classical liberalism and developed into libertarian socialism in the 19^th Century. The free-market libertarians are really a 20^th Century phenomenon, another outgrowth of classical liberalism. For him the Left and the Right are both subject to the ideological shibboleths of technological progress, this dynamic is something to overcome and transcend. In a classic display of left-wing sectarianism Zerzan made periodic slights against Noam Chomsky and environmentalists, the main competition to his position at the eco-libertarian end of the radical Left. Really this is where Zerzan comes across as ultra-leftist and as we shall see he’s not adverse to forms of comfortable resistance.

Chomsky is wrong to claim that there isn’t a way of eliminating technology and even if there is we shouldn’t. Yet Zerzan isn’t all that clear about how we can break apart the system and return to that land of ‘Once upon a time…’ where there is no racism, homophobia, misogyny and no more hierarchical authority, no statism and no capitalism. When pushed on this Zerzan seems to opt for a dichotomy of ‘small actions’ such as cycling and ‘big acts’ of violence. He shirked away from any kind of mass-violence in a Khmer Rouge style destruction of society. Though he doesn’t evade the endorsement of political violence, it has to be about the destruction of private property. In such cases Zerzan stands on the side of rioters, the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. He also shirked away from a sudden collapse as that would reap a high body-count, in this sense Zerzan seems like less of an anarchist as it would imply a gradual transition. Rather than simply endorse the coming collapse of Western civilisation as a new hope, he calls for a primitive future.

This is where the ultra-leftist sectarianism converges with comfortable resistance and the nostalgia for a world outside of all our modern problems. Similarly the Greens can be damned if they deny that the system can’t be saved through innovations to eventually replace fossil fuels with sustainable energy. As much as the eco-Right are deluded in their plan to save capitalism through carbon caps, it isn’t the case that the eco-socialists are about the preservation of capitalist society. Really many Greens share Zerzan’s nostalgia for a human community of communities which precedes the horrors of industrial capitalism. In his vision community will instil responsibility in the same way that it is in co-ops as the ‘fuck-ups’ are present at meetings where collective deliberating goes on and everything is discussed democratically. This is where it’s clear that Zerzan is a product of the 60s, when the commune movement hoped to establish an alternate society free of any kind of power structure only to find the old structures were quickly reconstituted.

It seems then that there would be a need for conservatives to hold it all in place once it had been achieved. Actually you could read a conservative nostalgia out of Zerzan's view of the past. Amnesia is for reactionaries, though he isn't guilty of wiping away inconvenient truths it is the case that the anarcho-primitivists are selective about what they want to go back to. It is fitting then that Zerzan stands by autonomous deference within the system, this way we can all do our bit in the resistance. There is a conservative side to this also, as we remain inside our bubbles without televisions and mobile phones reading about the future primitive. The political is not just an individual decision, if we want to change the world we need collective acts and organisation. The wish almost matches the nightmares of many environmentalists: that we could sit still for too long and the world as it is would be gone forever. But this would be a crude anarcho-primitivism. The more civilisation, the more neuroses seems to summarise Zerzan’s position – it’s better to go back than to continue forward, backwards is forward!

Communism: A Love Story.

Ye are Many - They are Few!

In the midst of ideological and economic crises, we find ourselves unable to venture out from neoliberal capitalism and when we do it is only to conserve the social democratic post-war settlement which cannot defend itself. Of course, there are those who might have the audacity to walk further to socialism as a political alternative to capitalism in its entirety. We must remember socialism is an intermediate stage which seeks ultimately to undo itself. The time has come to resurrect the language of political ideals in this so-called post-political era of liberal managerialism. This is meant to be a world with no need for ideas and has moved beyond ideology. The anaemia of discourse as it is has gone on long enough. This is the time for serious theory as well as devoted belief and dedicated activism. For these reasons, we should be on the side of those - from Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri - who have devoted their intellectual capacities to developing a new kind of communism.

Even the enemies of socialism might concede it has some moral weight, but communism is irredeemable by comparison because of 20th Century history. We are reminded that not all socialists are communists, though every communist is a socialist. It should be noted that the idea of communism predates Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and actually has ancient roots, but this is not reason to step over Marx to his predecessors. As Terry Eagleton reminds us, in classical Marxian terms, the establishment of communism is preceded by the development of the material base to the point at which it can negate itself and drop clean out of consciousness. The material transcends itself at a certain point of superabundance. It was slavery and feudalism which provided the material conditions for capitalism, but it is capitalism which will produce the conditions for socialism and eventually communism. In a strange sense then socialism is indebted to capitalism, but as the great Nye Bevan would remind us "There can be no immaculate conception of socialism."

To this ultimate end socialism is a self-abolishing project, similarly the idea of communism will remain relevant until it is realised. The end and the means are eschew from one another to the point that the material prosperity, which will fund freedom, is the fruit of unfreedom. As it is inseparable from the horrors of slavery and market forces which laid the path to liberation. We might see communism as the escape from scarcity to the extent that we can actually forget about the very possibility of it. The Marxist notion of communism requires the development of the productive forces, free from the blockages of pre-history, to the extent that the economic system can give birth to a surplus sufficient for the abolition of labour and the fulfillment of the needs of everyone. Capitalism is the only historical mode of production capable of generating such a surplus, but the forces of production are not teleological. The system is not in place for the sake of historical development as it generates the surplus it is committed to the creation of scarcities.

The dialectical twist is that it is the materiality will release you from the forces of the material. We're not free of determinants in class society, we make our own history but by circumstances we cannot choose as Karl Marx reminds us in the Brumaire. The real kind of freedom is that where we're determined in such a way as to sit loose from economic determinants and to free us from the alienation of labour. As Sigmund Freud foresaw without the coercive process of labour we would all lounge about in various postures of jouissance - and this may be le communisme! Here we find the political and the economic are indivisible, as the reality of class society has to be acknowledged in order to eventually get rid of it. Terry Eagleton draws an analogy with revolutionary nationalism, where the point is to assert the unique culture of a nation in order for it to take an ordinary place in the community of nations.

On the Idea of Communism
Why Marx was Right

Capitalism, Regular not Diet

18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Communism in 1848

Lincoln's Favourite Play.

MACBETH:

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well

It were done quickly. If the' assassination

Could trammel up the consequence and catch

With his surcease success, that but this blow

Might be the be-all and end-all, here;

But here upon this bank and shoal of time,

We'd jump the life to come. But in these cases

We still have judgement here, that we but teach

Bloody instructions which, being taught, return

To plague th'inventor. This even-handed justice

Commends th'ingredience of our poisoned chalice

To our own lips. He's here in double trust:

First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,

Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been

So clear in his great office, that his virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against

The deep damnation of his taking-off,

And pity, like a naked new-born babe,

Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed

Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye

That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur

To prick the sides of my intent, but only

Vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself

And falls on th'other. 

In Defence of the Welfare Queen.

As always the reactionary press are full to the brim with hateful tales about the women who "choose" to be jobless and claim the plentiful benefits offered to single-mums by squeezing out as many babies. This "lifestyle choice" is a favourite topic at The Daily Mail where the job description of a journalist amounts to sucking on the end of a sewer pipe whilst saluting the Führer. In the run-up to the General Election of 2010 the right-wing media repeatedly pinned failure on New Labour and attributed a policy of encouraging young mothers not to bother with work and to remain unmarried. It is an easy job for journalists and it pays off, there is plenty of advertising revenue for a paper which doesn't raise difficult questions about the powerful and instead takes to bashing the poor. Baiting working-people against the so-called benefits culture is easy because the unemployed are not politically active and have no one who represents their interests to defend them.

The wider insinuation is that New Labour sunk the country into debt by giving too much to people on benefits. This is a complete falsehood and it is amazing that such a lie can be pandered by the media after the financial meltdown of 2008, which caused the recession that sent tax-revenues into decline so public spending became unsustainable. As for benefits, it was New Labour that hired an investment banker called David Freud to overlook welfare benefits and pensions in 2007, with the specific aim of cutting benefits. The banker recommended that we replace all of the crumbs - housing benefit, incapacity benefit, disability allowance etc. - with a single and means-tested payment designed to 'incentivise' work. Then the Conservatives came along in 2010 to drive the plan through Parliament and slash £18 billion from benefits in the meantime. Before New Labour was given the boot David Freud also laid out plans to do away with incapacity benefit in favour of a temporary scheme which "compels" recipients into the workforce.

The underlying assumption of cutting benefits to drive single-mothers into work is that children-rearing isn't work. It's just something that women do for free, like a lot of things. The effects of driving single-mothers into the workforce in this way are quite interesting. Jobs for people who have been unemployed generally require subsidies in order to guarantee that the firms will take them on. We can see this in Britain where David Cameron has cut national insurance, which he deemed a "jobs tax", in order to create jobs for the long-term unemployed. Effectively the cut in national insurance is a subsidy to firms that take on the long-term unemployed, which has the potential to lower wages across the workforce and further undermine trade unions. So single-mothers shouldn't be raising their children and living off of "handouts" instead these women should be coerced into work so that you can be paid even less. You'll never read that in The Daily Mail, where the most basic level of moral decency is also conspicuously absent.

According to one study, which was no doubt distorted by The Daily Mail in the usual manner, the average single-mother is on around £3,546 a year in benefits. That amounts to £74,466 for 21 years, about £74 a week which is less than a day's work at minimum wage. At the same time it should be noted that it costs on average around £200,000 to raise a child to that age in this country. There is little to no mention that the amount of benefit fraud costs around £500 million to £1.5 billion a year, with estimates of over-payments ranging to around £3 billion a year. So it is clear that it will be the disabled, the mentally ill and people on very low incomes who will be hit by the benefit cuts. These aren't the "welfare queens" that the Republicans have slammed for nearly 50 years, these are the people who are set to be forced off of benefits after the Coalition has stipulated that each job centre has to sanction 3 people a week. A sanction cuts off the benefits from the recipient for a period up to 6 months.

The only permissible issue to debate is to what extent child benefit is necessary. Most recently the debate over benefits was whether it was right of David Cameron to cut child benefit for wealthier families. The presupposition that a little over £20 a week more per child is enough to raise a child remains constant, along with the suggestion that the women who have raise children on benefits are simply "whores" who have chosen to live off of your money and not go to work. Notice the other presupposition: there are jobs for women which pay enough to raise a child on. These are the laws of the commentariat in it's eager campaign to pit the working-class against itself and even at the BBC we find the question is limited to "Should we be paying people to have children?" All the while the gutter press act as if contraception and personal responsibility are the answer, in other words no benefits for anyone, no free child-care and no doubt contraceptives shouldn't be handed out for free. Notice that this level of 'personal responsibility' is only expected of the poorest of the poor.

In Defence of the Under-Class.

In contemporary Britain, the Right appears to be constantly obsessing over the resilience of the welfare state, which they so detest, that was constructed under the watchful eyes of men like Clement Attlee, William Beveridge and Aneurin Bevan. The same people who began dismantling the British Empire incidentally, giving in to Gandhi in India famously. Despite the success the Thatcherites have had in "rolling back" the state, except in areas which are beneficial to the wealthy, there is still a very real obsession on the Right with dismantling the welfare state. This is particularly true of the benefits system, which remains a constant subject of fixation. There is often talk of a "culture of dependency", created by liberals and left-wing lunatics, which has ruined Britain, in papers like The Sun and The Daily Mail. Tory politicians like Daniel Hannan, and right-wing think tanks like the Adam Smith Institute, still hold a place in their cold little hearts for a contempt of the National Health Service. Thankfully, the disdain of the NHS which free-market fundamentalists possess is not welcome in government and will not be tolerated by the British electorate. However, due to the rampant individualism of the last 30 years, attacks on the benefits system are not just tolerated but are welcomed by some.

Take the right-wing attacks launched on single-parents, usually single-mothers, who are living off of government "hand-outs". This is what it boils down to, in plain English: single-mums don't have the necessary means to raise their children, thus there offspring will turn out as dysfunctional, exhibiting various emotional and behavioural problems. Therefore, we should cut off their benefits to "encourage" these parents to work and teach them to regret having ended the relationship they were in before it went sour. This "argument" is devoid of any concept of compassion or empathy, which is ironic because it is often utilised by populist reactionaries who claim to care about society. It's astounding and appalling that this so-called "argument" can be accepted by anyone. Those who argue that the benefits system should be reconstructed to neglect single-parents, and by extension children, cannot claim to be looking to prevent the moral breakdown of society. The prevalence of opposition to the benefits system among the working-class population is a testament to the uniformity of the mass-media. There has been a campaign against single-parents in this country, going back to the early 1990s, and they are now depicted as another symptom of "Broken Britain" today. We should not be allowing this to happen in our society.

The major assumption of this view is that raising a child is too much for one person, but not so much to deserve reward and isn't an obstacle to them from working a "real job". The fact that it costs parents on average somewhere between £140k and £200k, to raise a children to the age of 18, seems irrelevant to these people. Those who lean toward this view, among the working-class, are mostly seeking tax-cuts and don't see why they should support those, whom they see as failing to contribute anything to society. But in doing so, such people are contributing to societal decline. This may mean that the people who lean towards this view have not thought it through. Since, if we want to live in a decent society,  we have an invested interest in the rearing of the next generation. Despite what Margaret Thatcher believed, there is such a thing as society. Therefore, we should not subject them to the kind of viciousness that only individualism and the free-market can unleash. If we are not willing to endure the horror of such forces, it is immoral of us to extend these standards to others.

The notion that we as individuals are obligated to work on command under fear of absolute poverty - reliant on charity from strangers, friends and relatives - is deeply reactionary. As it is in opposition to Enlightenment values. The idea that eliminating the benefits system is consistent with the improvement of society is an utter fallacy. Since such an elimination is more compatible with rampant individualism, it is not compatible with any collective concerns like community or solidarity. Because the aim is to create a society in which people perform on command for money, to avoid becoming destitute, which is not free action and is slavish. To rent oneself out to a Boss could easily be seen as a degrading servile act, having no choice in the matter as it is the only way to survive. There was a time when such a thing was viewed with derision. Way back, when many working-class people saw laissez-faire capitalism as destructive of their culture and dignity. Nevertheless, today we can see people turning to the belief that people are obligated to work and should be forced to work. It could be said that this a result of successful indoctrination.


In that sense, the people, arguing that individuals should have no choice in the matter, are no more than "Little Eichmanns" propping up an economic system based on domination and exploitation. This is not to say that everyone should just not work and lie back on a bed of dole money for the rest of their lives. But that there should be greater efforts made by our government to create jobs, to nurture worker cooperatives and workers self-management, to further the 'Common Good' of society. It seems fair to say that those who work in a place should own and run them, free of subordination by a Boss, does it not? It may sound radical or idealistic. Though, if we take some instances where factories and cab firms in the US have been successfully collectivised, and are run democratically by workers, wages increased as did efficiency. This is because the workers on the ground floor know a lot more, about what the work entails and how things should work, than the Boss sitting behind a desk in a suit and tie giving orders.

In the book The Spirit Level, an analysis of statistics relating to social deprivation and inequality revealed something quite interesting. There is a correlation between economic inequality and social deprivation, such as violent crime, teenage pregnancies, drug abuse, mental illness, literacy and even high obesity rates. The gap between the rich and the poor is now wider than it was in the 1960s. It was over the last 30 years, that pockets of deprivation have been formed and have continued to expand. Whereas, in Scandinavia and Japan, issues such as violent crime, teenage pregnancies, drug abuse and obesity are far less common. Coincidentally, Scandinavian states like Norway and Sweden are far more equal than the UK, the same is true of Japan. It is redistribution of wealth that has made countries like Sweden more egalitarian. But the "Little Eichmanns" have no problem with the massive inequality in British society, in fact they couldn't care less about it. Instead they are preoccupied with implementing reactionary policies that can deprive children of a decent start in life, but also function to trap people in jobs they loathe.

It most definitely the case that the populist writers of The Sun and The Daily Mail are posing simplistic solutions for complex problems. The opinion that Britain is "broken" and that social engineering can resolve the problem is like most suggestions posited by the Right these days.  It appeals to the angry white men, who read such papers and will be riled up into a rage against other poor people. But not against the richest 1% of the British population, who could provide our public services with £10 billion to spend on the public sector, if they paid 1% in national insurance. Papers like The Sun and The Daily Mail are owned and run by people like Rupert Murdoch (rich, white and male), so they wouldn't want to advocate  any tax hikes. That might "rock the boat". This is also revealing of another contradiction on the Right. An income increase (e.g. tax-cuts) for the rich is an incentive, whereas an income rise (e.g. benefits) for the poor is a disincentive. The problems can be seen by many, as we have seen much deprivation over the last 30 years, and the solutions they offer appeal to the most primal of human feelings - fear and greed. Greed for lower taxes and more disposable income, fear of the moral collapse of society.

Significant Links:

Big Ideas for a Big Society?

Daniel Hannan and his Libertarian Plan for Britain

Daniel Hannan on Fox News

Conversations with History: Noam Chomsky
The Spirit Level: Why more Equal Societies almost always do better
Capitalism: A Love Story. DVD Extra - Union Cab of Madison

In Tyler we Trust. In Fight Club we Bleed.

"I wanted to destroy something beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground." - The Narrator

It could be said, Fight Club is the story of a man depressed by the banal materialism of his life and his meaningless job, who descends into insomnia and eventually madness. He engages in civil disobedience against consumer culture, and ultimately commits an act of terrorism. This is the shallowest interpretation, that the story is simply about a man and his arc is guided by his dissociative identity disorder, which is true to an extent and should not be overlooked, but there is so much more to Fight Club than merely mental illness. In fact, if you accept such a view you are underestimating the film, as much as I did when I first held the DVD and read it's title. Though, when you really think about it, it is difficult to sum up what Fight Club actually is about, without negating some viewpoint or interpretation, since Fight Club is wonderfully polysemic. This is true of the film, but even more true of the novel. Therefore, this article is not about pin-pointing all of the themes and possible interpretations of Fight Club.

The novel Fight Club was written in 1996 by Chuck Palahniuk, the first of many wonderfully transgressive and satirical novels in his career. Palahniuk is best known for his unique style, darkly comic subject matter and somewhat "cultish" fan base. His most well known books are Fight Club and Choke. Palahniuk was heavily influenced by minimalists such as Tom Spanbauer and Amy Hempel, as well as postmodernists like Douglas Coupland and Bret Easton Ellis. His writing has also been influenced by Continental philosophy, specifically existentialism and post-structuralism. As a writer, Chuck specialises in transgressive fiction, satire and horror. There seems to be nothing that is out of bounds for Palahniuk. In the past his writing has featured fist-fighting, terrorism, pornography, plastic surgery, death cults, nihilism and masturbation-gone-wrong. The characters of his books, tend to be philosophical and misanthropic to some extent, usually present alternative views and theories about life. So far, two of his books have been made into films, Fight Club in 1999 and Choke in 2008, and it looks likely that some of his other novels may be adapted for film one day.

The time of which the book and film were made are of significance as the 1990s were a strange time in America and the world in a way. The Cold War had just ended, leaving the US without an enemy that would provide sufficient justification for their bloated defence budget. The limbo between the age of the "Red Terror" and the "War on Terror". Francis Fukuyama declared it the "end of history" and that capitalism, in the liberal democratic variant, had triumphed. As theoconservatives became increasingly prominent in the GOP and began campaigning against abortion, the 12 years of Republican rule came to an end in 1993 with the rise of Bill Clinton and the 'New Democrats'. The US seemed to be under threat more so from domestic terrorists in the form of white angry men living in the woods. The year before Fight Club was published, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols bombed the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, damaging or destroying over 300 buildings, killing 168 people and injuring 680. Until 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing was the most horrific terrorist attack committed in the US. The attack was a reaction against the Waco Siege and the Ruby Ridge incident of the early 90s. The prospect of domestic terrorism in the US became more plausible after Oklahoma.

"You know, the condom is the glass slipper of our generation. You slip it on when you meet a stranger. You dance all night then you throw it away. The condom, I mean. Not the stranger." - Marla Singer

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, has been referred to as the "torchbearer for the nihilistic generation" and he continues to be associated with nihilism today. Yet he insists he is a romantic and it could be said that this romanticism bleeds into his work. "My novels are all romantic comedies, but they're just romantic comedies that are done with very dysfunctional, dark characters." At the core of most of Palahniuk's work, there is a romantic element, which often goes unnoticed by his readers, overshadowed by his unique blend of dark satire and transgressive minimalism. "Actually, my characters are still playing in a very classic sort of boy-gets-girl scenario, or girl-gets-boy scenario." In Fight Club, the love story is obviously centred around the narrator, also known as Jack, and Marla Singer. It could be said, he has reconstructed the genre of romantic comedy in his work, it is a combination of romance with dark humour that go so well together.

The relationship between Marla and Jack, and by extension Tyler Durden, has a Freudian quality, in the novel it is even described as a love triangle. The Oedipal overtones are even more overt in the novel, in which the narrator often compares Marla and Tyler to his parents. The narrator's father set up a new family every 6 years, Tyler described this as "setting up franchises", the way in which Durden later set up cells of Project Mayhem across America almost imitates this attitude. Jack's father embodies consumer culture and Tyler is the subversion of that embodiment. In "killing" Tyler, his father, his model of God, Jack rids himself of the qualities in him which reflect those individuals. It is these qualities that stand in the way of him and Marla. Palahniuk once pointed out that traditional literature is anti-passivity and anti-rebellion, but advocates a sort of moderation of passivity and rebellion in individuals. Traditionally, the passive character destroy themselves, the rebel is destroyed by society, but the moderate character survives and lives on as the witness. In Fight Club, Palahniuk collapsed these character archetypes into the narrator. Jack is initially the passive character that kills himself and Tyler is the rebel crushed by society. Subsequently, Jack emerges as the third character archetype, the moderate witness which walks off into mist.

It has been said often that Tyler Durden is the contemporary version of Nietzsche's Ubermensch. But after looking at the way in which Chuck Palahniuk collapsed the three character archetypes into one protagonist, one could conclude that by the film's climax, and the book's conclusion, that Jack is closer to the Ubermensch than Tyler. This theory, reduces the importance of Durden to a mere liminal being in the transition taking place in the life of Jack. Interestingly, the narrator only kills Tyler after the scene in which Durden deliberately crashes a car and has to drag Jack out of the wreckage, which is aesthetically very similar to a birth of a child. If we view the scene as one of rebirth, the narrator has been in a dormant, perhaps foetal, state up to now and has been brought into the world by accident. Only after leaving behind his dormant past can Jack replace Tyler as Marla's lover. It is fitting that Tyler, the subversion of father and God, is the one to drag Jack out of the wrecked car and into the world. The narrator began as the passive foetus and had to be "reborn" with the help of Tyler Durden. But ultimately Jack had to destroy Tyler in order to overcome the rebellious tendencies which had usurped his formerly passive nature.


Where does Marla fit into all of this, is she just a play-thing for Jack? There is an interesting theory going around on the web, that Marla Singer is just like Tyler - an extension of Jack's subconscious. After the shocking revelation that Tyler and Jack are the same person, it is easy to view the entire story sceptically. From such a point-of-view, it could be that the entire project is all in Jack's head. However, in Palahniuk's fiction there is a consistent pattern of strong female characters, in many ways stronger than the males. Marla shares some of Jack's characteristics, she attends group therapy and is somewhat nihilistic, but unlike him she does not have the need for a person to improve herself. To say that woman does not exist, is the lowest male mythology. This originates in the Adam and Eve story, in which woman is essentially man's desire realised. As pointed out in The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, a radical anti-feminist might even go further to say that woman is man's guilt realised. If man "cleanses" his desire, ridding himself of fantasies, woman ceases to exist. But it is Tyler who is the fantasy which the narrator "rids" himself of. Woman exists regardless of man's desire, as emphasised in Marla's refusal to leave the groups and forcing Jack to compromise.

"He was born in a mental institution and he sleeps only one hour a night. He's a great man. Have you heard about Tyler Durden?" - Robert "Bob" Paulson

Jack our anti-hero, the unlikeliest of proletariat revolutionaries, is the consummate member of Generation X. Cynical and nihilistic, lost to passive consumption. He's a white male, between the ages of 24 and 49, he should be at the tip of the American patriarchy. But he's not and he's very angry about it. An anger reminiscent of the common rage of white working-class Americans in the mid 1990s. In his early 30s, Jack is one of many children, all related to each other by one father, in his family that have been largely raised by women and neglected by their mutual father. He made yearly phone calls to his father asking advice about life, his father advised him to go to college after he's finished high school, once Jack finished college his father advised him to get a job. As a man, born in the late 1960s, old enough by the 1980s to receive a high school and college education, he was old enough to suffer through Reaganomics and the massive wage cuts they resulted in by the late 1980s (the second biggest cut in "labour costs" in the world, second only to those made by Margaret Thatcher).

In other words, Jack was old enough to endure the emasculating and humiliating chore of work in the service sector, without having enjoyed the glory of big muscles and a sense of community derived from unions that his working class forefathers took pride in. The workforce the narrator had to join in the early 90s had been virtually castrated by Reagan for the benefit of big business. He works as a recall coordinator for a major automobile company, the company is responsible for producing defective vehicles to cut costs, his job is to limit liability for this negligence and bad publicity. He only initiates a recall, if the cost is less than that of an out-of-court settlement, which the company is more than able to make. The words "How does he sleep at night?" come to mind. Jack is ultimately a tool for cost cutting, he is a service to the bourgeoisie, with "no special purpose or place". He is guilty, in his complicity with corporate criminals, of all the elites are guilty of. But he is still oppressed in his role as recall coordinator.

The narrator literally has no rightful place amongst the elites or the oppressed masses, he is one of "God's middle children" as Tyler once said. Many Americans consider themselves middle-class, and the middle-class is frequently referred to in US politics for this reason. In the novel the phrase is applied much more widely and accurately, because the first club formed by Durden consist mostly of middle-class Americans. This phrase seems to refer to the recurrent themes of fatherhood and consumerism, and the way in which the narrator equates them with each other. It is clear from other phrases like "If you could be God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose?" that Jack feels his role in the world as one of many middle children is one of insignificance. To the characters, consumer capitalism is almost God-like, the main difference being that capitalism can be escaped. Bu for Jack and the Space Monkeys there is only one way out, through violence.

"The liberator who destroys my property, is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free." - Tyler Durden

When we first meet him, the narrator is trapped by his desires for perfection through the consumption of goods, his "Ikea nesting instinct", and the earning of money is required to temporarily satisfy such desires. Of course, a permanent end to the desires which hold him hostage, thus his nihilism, is unattainable to achieve and he is trapped in a vicious circle, constantly seeking temporary release and constantly striving. The Ancient Greeks had a word for this, pleonexia, and Karl Marx had another term for it, commodity fetishism. If you live merely to pursue the accumulation of wealth, you are not free, you become a slave to that wealth. In the words of Tyler Durden "The things you own end up owning you." The self-harm and consensual violence is a way for him, and the Space Monkeys, to beat these fetishistic tendencies into submission. It is the severely indoctrinated qualities which become the object of horrific violence.

Breaking free of indoctrination hurts and letting go of commodities hurts, the revolution is a process of pain. Just as Fanon thought, the violence of the revolution is a liberation of individuals from the dominant deology, inducing pleonexia. Fight Club captures this notion in the violence that serves as escapism from the mind-numbing ennui of what commonly passes for life. Fanon felt this justified violence and even acts of terrorism. In the words of Tyler Durden: "I'm breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions, because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit." Though, the narrator is not a proletarian striving towards revolution, if anything he is the embodiment of the Western petty bourgeoisie or as Tyler labels them "[the] slaves with white collars." The point of the self-inflicted violence is that it cleanses the individual of indoctrinated qualities, that seem inescapable, in order to let go of the goods/services that possess you and to truly pursue a liberating revolution. Such qualities, Jack recognises in himself through Tyler, are the source of the narrator's self-hatred and self-destruction.

Violence is not just a tool to achieve political and ideological goals, for Fanon, it is cathartic and awaken the people, from the insidious hegemony of ideology, transforming them into "new men". This is particularly significant, as masculinity is another theme in Fight Club. The indoctrinated qualities, Jack and the Space Monkeys are desperately attempting to "punch out" with the guidance of Tyler Durden, are often emphasised as feminine or emasculate. The blond character, which the narrator notes as pretty and girlish looking, is the unfortunate subject of a particularly brutal beating from Jack. The fact that effeminate aspects of society are despised and treated with violence could be interpreted as misogynistic. However, it could also be said that the characters believe they are trapped in a similar situation, as women were prior to the Feminist Movement, that they are trapped and forced into subserviency. The subservient role the Space Monkeys have been forced into, is that of a wage slave, whereas the submissive role women were trapped in is that of the housewife.

Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away

The queen is their slave.

This is the only Haiku poem, from the others in the book, to also feature in the film. Notice that it highlights the roles of "worker bees" and "drones" as freer than the "queen bee". One could theorise that this poem, is an expression by the character's urge to turn the tables on the capitalist structures they so despise, reducing such structures to a subservient role. But due to the fact that the feeling of castration, seems to be a result of engaging with capitalism on such a devoted level, which may in fact be the reason that the individuals could grow to hate the femininity they associate with consumer culture, after it reduced them to "queens". One could say that the Space Monkeys and the Feminists both despise the subservient roles people are forced into, against their will and provided with no way out. Thus, Bob's "bitch tits" are not just literally the result of his role in society - promoting a chest-expansion program - but the result of the system which drove him to use steroids to such excessive lengths.

Some liberal film critics accused Fight Club of promoting nihilism and fascism. This is unsurprising in a way, Fight Club was released to a post-Columbine American audience, if the film had been released to a post-9/11 audience it would've probably been banned because of it's apocalyptic finale. Though, there are definitely aspects of nihilism and quasi-fascism in the film it is not a promotion of those "values", this is definitely a reactionary misinterpretation. The aspects of nihilism in Fight Club are a satirical reflection of the "anti-values" espoused by the American consumer democracy "You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die." The narrator is referring to the truth of wage slavery and the role the public plays in elections, we're just here to rent ourselves out and to push a button every 4 or 5 years that allows the bourgeoisie to justify their status as our rulers.

The narrator's arc tunnels backwards through late capitalism and liberal democracy, showing us all the ugliness and brutality of "consumer democracy" along the way. He transgresses from what should be blissful passive consumption to the nihilistic nature of wage slavery and after that where else is there to head, except fascism? The quasi-fascist values present in Project Mayhem and it's progenitor, dictatorial rule and violent repression of all opposition, are the creation of Tyler Durden, who replaced the free market as the signifier for Americans who have become "Space Monkeys"; like Hitler becoming the signifier for Germans who became National Socialists. The fascism and nihilism of Fight Club is an exaggeration, that mocks the strange way in which capitalism and democracy stand together today.

Articles on Fight Club:
Masculine Identity in the Service Class: An Analysis of Fight Club

Fight Club: A Ritual Cure For the Spiritual Ailment Of American Masculinity

Fight Club: The Return of Hobbes
Interview with Chuck Palahniuk by Playboy
Interview with Chuck Palahniuk and a clip show
The Unexpected Romantic