Our very own Tom Burroughs has long complained to me about the consistently venal and ugly way in which businessfolk are portrayed in TV drama. His highly meritorious complaint is picked up and expanded upon by Rand Simberg
Having spent a few years of my life as a jobbing scriptwriter, I have moved amongst these people and, from my experience, the anti-capitalist theme of much of their writing is no surprise given their almost universal woolly socialist outlook. I know that, in Britain at least, this is so overwhelmingly the prevailing paradigm that it is, to all intents and purposes, a hegemony
I have tried to examine the reasons for this and the one that I find most compelling is that their socialism is a reflection of their life experience.
Most of those who spend their lives pursuing artistic success will do so fruitlessly. Very, very few make it and, even those that do, have spent years in struggle and poverty. The cliche of the artist starving in a garrett is a cliche because it is largely true. The simple, seemingly eternal, truth is that there are way too many people wanting to earn their living from artistic endeavour than the market can viably support and possessing talent guarantees nothing
Yet, there is no paucity of effort on their part. A writer may spend years of his or her life pouring their heart and soul into a magnum opus that nobody wants to publish or buy. Nor are they lacking in cognitive faculties. Most writers are highly learned and articulate and many feel that, for that alone, they should be rewarded in some way but are not. It is easy to imagine just how rudely offensive they find it when a monosyllabic, uncouth market trader can go off to the City of London to ply his share-dealing skills and earn more money in a month than most artists will earn in any decade of their lives
That is what they find so wrong about capitalism: its indifference. It cares not a jot for sincerity and effort and craft and endows its riches upon those who fulfil the often flimsy and evanescent wishes of consumers. The dedicated artist whose fingers have bled in learning to play Shostakovich on his cello, but can’t afford to give up his day job, knows that something needs changing when Gerri ‘Spice Girl’ Halliwell (who gave consumers what they want, what they really, really want) builds another palatial home on the Cote D’Azur. It’s all so unfair
Just how much more attractive to any writer or artist is the warm embrace of socialism with it labour theory of value, its promise to support and succour artists regardless of their output, to banish harsh wordly concerns of homelessness and unemployment and build a society based on status rather than contract
There are, of course, exceptions. There are always exceptions but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. And, for sure, there may be other factors involved, most notably good, old fashioned peer pressure. Success as a writer depends upon acceptance by the notoriously cliquey world of the Literatti and either you lockstep or step out (I stepped out)
But it is my view that, lying behind all of it, is the almost unchallengeable belief that Mistress Capitalism is cruel, capricious and immoral and so are those who feed at her breast
