Unwelcome Truths from the American Rust Belt

Folk in and around the North Staffordshire area may be interested in this event, due to take place on November 1st:

I am writing to invite you to a public discussion on the future of Stoke-on-Trent and its housing needs on Thursday 1st November 2012 at 6:30pm in the North Staffordshire Conference Centre, Hartshill Road, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 7NY.

Earlier this autumn, Len Gibbs, Director of the Epic Housing association in Bentilee, went on a research trip around the American rust-belt cities of Buffalo, Detroit and Pittsburgh. This will be his report back to The Potteries on the harsh lessons we need to learn so we don’t end up with the kind of wastelands which America’s post-industrial cities face – with acres of boarded-up housing, extensive depopulation, and racial segregation. But he will also be presenting some challenging and interesting new policy ideas for getting Stoke’s housing needs solved and, with it, some much needed economic regeneration.

Responding to Len’s presentation will be Dr Alexandra Jones, director of The Centre for Cities. Alexandra has worked extensively on the North Staffordshire economy and now leads the UK’s leading urban affairs think-tank. She is very well-placed to comment on Len’s report and its meaning for cities like Stoke-on-Trent.

The floor will then be opened for public debate and discussion to question Len further and test the relevance of his analysis.

I hope the evening is able to offer some new perspectives on the City’s future housing needs and prompt a productive discussion within the community about options for meeting these future challenges. It would be a great privilege if you felt able to join the evening’s debate.

As spaces are limited, I would ask that you RSVP if you wish to attend this event, as soon as possible. Please email tristramhunt@parliament.uk or phone the office on 01782 410455 to confirm your attendance.

By way of prefacing his presentation, Len had this to say:

In September this year I visited the cities of Cleveland, Buffalo, Youngstown, Pittsburgh and Detroit. These are all cities which have gone through severe economic and social transitions – from wealthy to poor; from growing to shrinking; from busy to quiet; from White to Black and from big league players to bit part actors in the unfolding drama of America’s wider economic transformations.

All of these cities have faced the same kind of problems that we are dealing with in Stoke. They have seen their core industries close, they have lost population, the suburbs and adjoining areas have stolen their middle classes, their populations have grown poorer and their civic leaders have had to balance diminishing resources against increasing needs.

Of course, America is not Britain – there are some things that are very different but the core problems are very similar. These cities lost their competitive edge and saw their Steel mills, Car factories and coal mines close. These industries also left toxic legacies which have scarred the environment with polluted rivers and land, derelict buildings and low skills and expectations. The geography which stimulated their growth has turned against them as new geographies have emerged – lower transport costs, cheaper labour elsewhere, long distances from the new centres of commerce and a cold climate.

Some of the consequences that these cities are grappling with include:

• Collapsing demand for housing
• Collapsing house prices
• Increasing housing abandonment
• High rates of joblessness and welfare dependency
• The flight of the better off to the suburbs
• Declining infrastructure
• The emergence of gang cultures and ghettos

These cities have had to deal with these problems for a long time and they are pioneering some great work. Their political leaders now talk about right sizing, they are stimulating new entrepreneurs, their educational and medical institutions are playing active roles in neighbourhood renewal, they have great community based organisations and they are pursuing agendas around neighbourhood stabilisation and smart growth.

They are on a long road to recovery and some are further on that journey than others. If there is one key lesson from America it’s this: start at the neighbourhood. Understand that your city is made up of neighbourhoods and that neighbourhoods are made up of people, activities and organisations. Work to stabilise and restore the places that have decent prospects and find new uses for the places that people don’t want to live in.

The road has been a hard one; there have been many mistakes but there are also some fantastic successes. Stoke has now entered the kind of economic and fiscal environment which these cities began to endure 20 years ago. An era of difficult choices is upon us – will we go the way of Detroit or will emulate Pittsburgh’s recovery? It’s time for us to seize the opportunity and learn from others.

Sounds interesting. Expect a post on the discussion shortly after.

Cat Interlude

It is indisputable that cats have taken over the internet. They're everywhere, invading our forums, purring all over Twitter, and clogging up thousands upon thousands of YouTube hours. As evolutionary strategies go, cats have it all sewn up. So, for one day only, this blog has surrendered itself to our moggy. 

His name is Charlie and there are a couple of things you should know about him. He and his tail, Gerald, once tried blogging. And two, for intractable reasons, he's affectionately addressed by his humans as 'Monkey' and 'Shit Bird'.

AVPS for one welcomes its feline overlord.

Changes to Jobseeker's Allowance

In September the numbers out of work and claiming JSA were 1.567M people, which is a decline of 4,000 on the previous month. Real unemployment stands approximately a million higher than this, and a further two million have taken on part-time work while seeking a full-time job. The total number of people in employment (irrespective of the character of the job and hours worked) is just under 29.6 million, up 510,000 on this time last year. The fact that employment can be up and economic activity down says all you need to know about the pay many of these occupations offer.

From today, if you’re out of work and claiming JSA or Employment Support Allowance, a raft of tough new sanctions and expectations come into force. According to the blurb circulated prefacing the announcement, we are told:

The Government expects people on benefit to take up the help and support available through Jobcentre Plus or the Work Programme so they can move off benefit and into work … The benefit system has to be fair to people who pay into it through taxation, as well as supporting those who cannot work due to ill-health or who have limited capability for work.

Apparently, JSA recipients will receive leaflets through the post explaining the changes in more detail. These are, in detail:

Higher level sanctions
Payment of Jobseeker’s Allowance could stop if claimants:

- leave a job voluntarily or due to misconduct
- fail to attend a Mandatory Work Activity programme
- are not available for a suitable employment opportunity, or
- refuse or fail to apply for a suitable job

They could lose their benefit for 13, 26 or 156 weeks (three years), depending on how many times they have failed to meet any of these responsibilities in the last 52 weeks.

Intermediate level sanctions
Payments of Jobseeker’s Allowance will stop and they will no longer qualify for Jobseekers allowance if, during their claim, they:
- do not actively seek work ; or
- are not available for work

Benefit will remain disallowed until they do what they have been asked to do. Upon undertaking what they were asked to do they may be sanctioned for a maximum of four weeks for a first failure rising to 13 weeks for second and subsequent failure within a 52 week period.

Lower level sanctions
Payment of Jobseeker’s Allowance could stop if they:
- fail to attend an adviser interview
- fail to take part in an Employment, Skills and Enterprise programme
- fail to comply with a Jobseeker direction
- do not take the opportunity of a place on a programme or training course, or refuse, fail to attend, or lose through misconduct a place on a programme or training course.

They could lose their benefit for four weeks the first time and for 13 weeks for any further times they do not meet these responsibilities in a 52 week period.

Recipients of ESA are seeing their benefit hit with similar sanctions:

Changes to Employment and Support Allowance sanctions
Regulations planned to come into force in December 2012 will introduce a revised sanctions regime for ESA (WRAG) claimants.

If a claimant has been placed in the Work-Related Activity Group and they do not attend or take part in a work-focused interview, or do not carry out work-related activity without a good reason, their ESA may be reduced by £71.00 per week. The additional amount they are paid for being in the work related activity group and any premiums they may be entitled to will continue to be paid in full until they attend the interview or carry out the activity.

Their ESA may also be reduced for one, two or four more weeks after they attend the interview or do the work-related activity. This depends on whether they have already had their ESA reduced in the previous 52 weeks.

As a general rule I accept the principle that unemployment benefit is an element of the social contract, that society affords maintenance payments to the out of work on the understanding they seek employment. Unfortunately, the system the Tories have introduced is overly punitive, unfair, and seeks to penalise recipients for having the temerity to claim. Conditioning these measures is the default policy assumption unemployed folk are lazy good-for-nothings who stay in bed, hang round drinking, or watch (and appear!) on Jeremy Kyle at the tax payers’ expense. With this reasoning in play how a ‘suitable job’ or a ‘suitable opportunity’ is defined without any rigour. Also lacking is clarity over what “voluntarily” leaving a job means. I suspect the DWP does issue guidelines to its decision makers and some Job Centre advisors, but there's a lot of leeway given to separate the deserving from underserving claimants.

Successive governments and the press have scored a victory on welfare that will be hard to come back from. Despite the prevalence of unemployment among the young and women in general, “getting tough” on benefits is a standard feature of received political wisdom and one that enjoys widespread popularity. No party is going to win votes with manifesto commitments to more generous benefits and an easing of sanctions.

Instead, the left must stake out and win a new high ground on welfare. It is not enough to make the case that unemployment has systemic causes and that the benefit changes will consign whole families of the working poor to the abyss. We need to look again at the role of the state in the labour market to rebalance the social contract. A good starting point for a rethink would be to supplement the various training available with a guaranteed job after a period of unemployment.

Womb Tanks and Revolution: Shulamith Firestone

For a generation of feminist activists Shulamith Firestone was at once an inspiration and a provocation. I was therefore sorry to hear about her death back in August.

Firestone's position as a key figure in the emergent Women's Liberation Movement of the early 70s was cemented on the basis of her seminal work, The Dialectic of Sex. The book proved to be a pivotal moment in the development of (radical) feminist politics and remains an important text for activists and students of social theory.

Her point of departure was the argument that sexual inequality could not be reformed away because it is the key foundational principle on which society is based. Engels in his Origin of the Family concurs with this point. As hunter/gatherer societies of prehistory settled into cycles of cultivation and domestication, Engels argues this marks the first time in history when human communities begin producing surpluses over and above what was necessary for the satisfaction of immediate material need. This revolution in social development coincided with a shift from matrilineal kinship groups to more and more discrete patrilineal family groups. This "world historic defeat of the female sex" saw the establishment of gendered privileges accruing to the male head of the household - most crucial of which was the control over sexual reproduction. For Engels, this expropriation reduced women to chattel. Gendered distinction became the first class relationship in human history, of where the labour of women in the household was directed and its social product appropriated by a power outside themselves. It is this set of kinship relations that set in train the subsequent development of the class societies of antiquity.

What Engels does not do is to provide an explanation why it was women and not men who became the original labouring class. Was it merely an accident of history? Firestone's answer was something deeper: biology. She located the stratification of the 'sex class' in biological difference. Because it is women who fall pregnant and give birth, the dependence of the infant on them means men and women were not equally privileged from the beginning. This dependence, which could be socialised to a degree in the environs of the hunter/gatherer band was 'privatised' when settled communities based around households started emerging. Child birth and the raising of children was now controlled by and subject to the interests of the first patriarchs. For Firestone, it follows that feminism needs to do more than concur with socialists in seeking to abolish class society, it must tackle the wellspring of male privilege to stop all the old crap from coming back. And that means the abolition of the sex distinction itself.

Firestone was particularly scathing of what she called 'conservative feminism' in the Betty Friedan mould, which was "content" to secure greater autonomy and rights for women within the existing set up, and she predicted that consumerism would remove only the superficial signs of gendered oppression. Similarly she had little time for Freudianism for whom, in common with many anti-psychiatry critiques of that period, psychological problems were diagnosed in terms of an individual's inability to cope rather than social pathologies stemming from how society is structured.

Firestone was critical of patriarchy within the then black power movement, likening the social situation of black men to white women, albeit one that allows for complicity with the existing order, an alliance against the 'father' represented by white men, or a relation of mutual contempt fuelled respectively by sexism and racism.

She was also extremely sceptical of the radical claims made for the sexual revolution. While 'free love' had broken down the gendered ties that stunted women as sexual beings, she observed that the new freedoms saw imitation of men's sexual behaviour. It also merely preserved the sex-class configuration in a new form.

Most intriguingly, and one reason perhaps why The Dialectic of Sex has hung around in the collective consciousness of social theory was Firestone's advocacy of advanced technologies to abolish the sex distinction. Toward the end of the book she portrays a future socialist society where the link between biological sex and reproduction is broken thanks to the development of, for want of a better phrase, artificial womb tanks. Sounds far fetched? They may be closer than you think. The raising of children is once again socialised, albeit on a higher and wider scale than possible in prehistory.

It might be tempting to treat Firestone's work as a curio from the late 60s explosion in radical ideas. But it would be a mistake to do so. There is Firestone's lasting theoretical contribution: as a revolutionary feminist manifesto, her message does not make clear how to make a revolution. But her engagement with Engels and the situation of her argument within a broad historical materialist framework is a vitally important argument to understanding how sex and class intertwine. And secondly, her emphasis on sexual reproduction and child-rearing has a contemporary resonance as abortion and arguments around women's reproductive freedoms continue to dominate US politics and, increasingly, becoming more of an issue here too. Despite the advances women have made since publication, child bearing and child rearing will not go away. Because of the fundamental role sexual reproduction plays in the structuring of gender relations, I'm sure this would come as no surprise to Firestone.

The Dialectic of Sex deservedly is a must-read classic of radical literature. To mangle Emma Goldman, if I can't have womb tanks I don't want your revolution.

For Labour Police and Crime Commissioners

I didn't go on today's march in London. Therefore, befitting an ongoing political degeneration, your humble scribe eschewed extra-parliamentary action for traditional doorstep campaigning with Joy Garner (pictured), Labour's candidate for the Police and Crime Commissioner elections in Staffordshire. Happily, our door knockers received a solid response.

It would be fair to say the upcoming contest hasn't exactly captured the popular imagination. With polling due on November 15th the government hasn't exactly gone all out to let the public know about Dave's flagship law and order policy. Small wonder turnout is predicted to reach new, miserable lows, immediately putting into question the legitimacy of each and every successful candidate (regardless of their politics) and of the exercise itself. Well done Tories for ably delivering another shambles.

As far as Labour is concerned, it is the party's settled position that the £30m plus cost of implementing the policy is money better spent on policing itself. That said, quite rightly, as it is happening anyway and because these are powerful political positions, it would be an own-goal to allow Tories and other anti-labour movement misfits a free run.

So what are PCCs for? What's their role in life? According to the briefing pack available from the Home Office, they will:

1) Determine overall policing priorities
2) Oversee and set policing budgets, and hold the Chief Superintendent to account
3) Formulate a plan for policing and crime prevention
4) Responsibility for a victim support strategy

Believe me when I say the documentation available to prospective PCC candidates doesn't elaborate very much on top of that.

There is more clarity where it comes to the PCC's accountability. In between elections they are scrutinised by a Police and Crime Panel, which draws its unremunerated representatives from the local authorities that operate in any given police area. For example, in Staffordshire PCP reps will be drawn from Stoke-on-Trent City Council, Staffordshire County Council, and the various district councils that operate across the county. There is also room for co-optees if the PCP sees fit.

Despite the government's unhelpful lack of direction, taking charge of a Police Force's budget and being responsible for giving it strategic direction is no Mickey Mouse post. This is why as many Labour commissioners need to be returned as possible.

In Staffordshire, the election is a straight fight between Joy and the Conservative candidate, Matthew Ellis. Joy's pledges involve working around the incoming Tory cuts of 20% as much as is practicable. She is opposed to the creeping privatisation of the police service, will protect frontline neighbourhood policing, and will carry on her present work on the outgoing Police Authority to make them more accountable to those communities. Joy is also a long-standing City Councillor in Stoke, a trade unionist (USDAW), and lives in the heart of Burslem. Cuts made to policing will impact her and the community she represents directly.

Fittingly, for a party no longer pretending to represent broad swathes of the population, the Tory candidate, Matthew Ellis represents Lichfield Rural East on Staffs County Council. He is a millionaire ex-businessman. Now, far be it for me to represent this election as a fight between a working class woman and a member of the landed ruling class - after all, as Dave likes to remind us, it's not their background that matters but where they are going.

Unfortunately, the Tory-ruled County Council of which Cllr Ellis is a leading member is a living preview of what awaits Staffordshire Police should he become PCC. Presently a huge chunk of the Council's education infrastructure, encompassing some 5,000 jobs, will be transferred to a private company just before next year's local elections. And this is the beginning of a rolling programme. The Tory Group aspire to hive off other county functions so all that remains is a small administrative core commissioning private providers to undertake services. It ticks the box of their small state obsessions while ensuring public accountability plays second fiddle to shareholder dividends. I wouldn't be surprised if links are established between whatever company scoops up the contract and Tory funders either.

What is happening at Staffordshire County Council exposes the key issue before voters in November. Here and elsewhere you can choose between Labour candidates who will make the best of a funding cut from central government and work to make policing accountable to our communities, or Tory candidates for whom the police is a commercial opportunity. For them, the commissioner part is prioritised over 'police' and 'crime'.

I know who I'll be voting for.

Nick Griffin's Desperate Stunt

On a day that demonstrates the thugs of Golden Dawn in Greece aren't necessarily having it all their way; on a damp, cold island off the coast of North West Europe, a beleaguered co-thinker attempts to stir up some controversy:

It's likely the small band of A Very Public Sociologist readers who've returned to the fold post-reboot have a passing familiarity with the case mentioned by Nazi Nick.

There is more than a hint of desperation to Griffin's tweet. It's hard to believe it's been three years since the BNP was something of a power in the land. In the grand scheme of things its two MEPs, London Assembly member, and 50-plus councillors (including threatening concentrations in Barking and Dagenham, and our very own Stoke-on-Trent) didn't really amount to much, politically speaking, but they attracted coverage way beyond those numbers. The BNP fed off anti-immigrant feeling whipped up by mainstream parties and the press, and sparked off panic right through the political spectrum when it appeared they were making inroads into what some now euphemistically term 'marginalised majority communities'. They congealed the logical end point of widespread immigrant-bashing and Islamophobia, legitimated it to a degree, and then pushed the political spectrum even further to the right on these issues. Looking back now, it's a wonder the BNP didn't do even better.

What a difference a few years can make. When the shine had come off the BNP's polished turd, the party found itself losing its membership database twice, wracked by ruinous local splits, subject to persistent allegations of of fraud, on the receiving end of an expensive and protracted court case, two leadership challenges, and, of course, disastrous election results that saw the BNP's council representation down from 50 to just three councillors.

Then there is the small matter of recent events. You may not have heard about it, but the BNP are undergoing what is probably its most damaging and, possibly terminal split. Fascist "elder statesman" and BNP MEP for Yorkshire and Humber Andrew Brons announced his resignation from the BNP just yesterday. I expect the standing he has among the party's dwindling ranks will encourage a number of core cadre to follow him out the exit.

Saddled with an imploding party and haunted by the spectre of continuing electoral irrelevance, Nick Griffin's tweet is an attempt to jumpstart the BNP's fortunes and, perhaps, distract his remaining loyalists from the crisis engulfing his organisation. As the one party that frequently and ostentatiously styles itself as the champion of Christian Britain (though, arguably, the BNP is the party least in tune with Christian values), and with the Islamophobia market currently cornered by the EDL, Griffin's publication of Michael Black and John Morgan's address and subsequent threat will probably see him arrested. The subsequent outrage and comment, of which this post is part, and the prospect of a court appearance might be enough to scoop up a few hundred gullible recruits and several thousand quid in 'defence fund' donations. But it could also help boost his position as the far right's most prominent personality and, in the event of a conviction, might prevent him from running again in 2014 - giving him the stuff from which to fashion a claim to political martyrdom.

With the run of absurd convictions around offensive and tasteless Facebook posts and tweets, it's hard to see how der Fuehrer won't get his wish.

Whatever happens, it will be a while before we truly see the back of Nick Griffin.

Dance Your PhD

Doing a PhD? Progress struck dead by writer's block? Why not try presenting your opus  as a piece of interpretative dance, like these chaps have done?

The above is a Social Science PhD looking at the evaluation of good governance of resources in rural areas. Dry as regolith on paper, but altogether more sumptuous when set to music.

The above was an Italian entry into the fifth annual 'Dance Your PhD' competition (more here).

About 10 years ago, one of my friends was recommended she perform a paper on feminist deconstruction through the medium of dance at a straight sociology conference. True fact.

Smaller States = Smaller Economies

Who knew a few lines on a page could stand for so much pain. This much-circulated piece from Monday's Graun provides an at-a-glance summary of what the Tories and LibDems are trying to do.

This programme for "shrinking the state", as our neoliberal friends euphemistically put it is nothing less than a wholesale redistribution of wealth from the least well-off to the affluent and wealthy. But if you're a regular reader of this blog, chances are you already have the government pegged as a narrow spectrum of well-heeled interests. A committee for the management of the common affairs of the bourgeoisie this lot ain't.

Their experiment, for that is what it is, shows the violence inflicted when you wind the historical film of social development backwards. There is the misery people forced to depend on benefits face as tougher thresholds and sanctions are introduced in return for less money. There are the lengthening queues outside hospitals and the dole office, the schools being left to collapse into dilapidation and much-loved public services that helped support community life decimated and left to seed.

Quite apart from the pain and suffering, there is the damage inflicted on British capitalism itself by going against the grain of social progress. The various social democratic and Labourist reforms of the post-war settlement made life better for millions of working people. Capital benefited too. From this point of view, it put more money in their pockets that could be spent on things. It therefore stands to reason that if you take money out of the economy it's not going to grow.

If you want a small state, you'll end up with a small economy. It's that simple.

On Jimmy Savile

Can much more be written about Jimmy Savile that hasn't already been said? The media are certainly having a good go, seeking women he abused as young girls and linking him to abuse at hospitals, the notorious Haut de la Garenne children's home in Jersey, and now suggestions he may have sexually abused corpses. A day does not pass without new, grim allegations splashing themselves across the headlines. And it is right that Savile's carefully-cultivated image as a national treasure is hung, drawn and quartered by the press. It is just a shame the violence done to his celebrity is scant compensation for the violence he visited upon his victims.

Who knows what else investigations into Savile's crimes might uncover? There are, of course, strong allegations linking him with Gary Glitter, and evidence that eyes were very much averted away from the sexist broadcast culture of the 60s, 70s and 80s that allowed his abuse of under-aged teenage girls to happen. There were plenty of rumours, of course, but the institutionally sexist culture of the time and the aura of celebrity could easily ensure voices raised in accusation were silenced. When it's a teenaged girl's word against a much-loved charity-mongering personality, who in the 1970s would a jury believe? And would it be that much different today?

Pre-Savile, perhaps. But now? As leads are followed and more victims come forward, there will be a few very-much-alive celebrities linked to the abuse starting to feel the heat. And with the collapse of the conspiracy of quiescence at Television Centre comes the rippling effect. Other celebrities with no relationship to Savile but are guilty of equally despicable things, who've paid off victims, bought the silence of accomplices, or are hiding behind expensive lawyers and their gagging clauses now have reasons to be fearful. 

Along with the exposure (and possible extinction?) of this criminal culture, I am also hopeful we could be seeing the beginnings of a cultural step change.

In this old post on the interminable Julian Assange circus, it was noted that "allegations of sexual assault and rape are ... historically under reported due to psychological trauma, shame, fear of reprisal, cultural pressure, and the complex of ties working to keep women in their place." These are ABC's that, unfortunately, this summer's nonsense over Assange's charge-evading antics showed some socialists need reminding of. But anyway. What that sorry episode demonstrated for all to see was how deeply sexism stains contemporary culture - even on the left.

Just for the record, I still believe Assange is innocent until proven otherwise. But I will give his groupies one thing. In defending their hero, they did point out it was most unusual for the British state to pursue someone with this degree of vigour for a crime of this nature. While it no doubt raised conspiratorial eyebrows in some quarters, I think this was a good thing simply because it provides a high-profile precedent for future treatment of crimes of sexual violence. The expectation that rape and assault allegations be investigated with the full weight of the law regardless of the standing of the alleged perpetrator was a consensus position that rallied people from all points of the political spectrum. And with the Jimmy Savile case, we're seeing its repetition and reinforcement in the popular imagination. This time, it's the abuser(s) whose behaviours are unacceptable - the abused are explicitly not positioned as 'asking for it'. For once, the responsibility of the abuse lies solely with the abuser. The shame attached to coming forward and making allegations has, in this case, been suspended. The weight of social opprobrium is temporarily lifted.

Wouldn't it be much better if things changed so this was the cultural default, rather than the exceptional situation facing victims of sexual abuse? Of course, yes. But how to get there? Perhaps the Savile saturation levels are such that among the thousands of people who fall victim to sex crimes every year, some will feel encouraged to report it. Perhaps because of the media attention, many more rapists and abusers will be tried, convicted and sentenced. Perhaps the depressing and disturbing exposure of Savile marks the beginning of a new maturity in how we as a society encounter and handle these awful crimes, and that the notion victims are in some way responsible for their abuse and/or rape is on its way out.

Perhaps.

Smash TV for the Nintendo Entertainment System

Just as a broken clock is right twice a day, so it is that games companies renowned for manufacturing turgid crap occasionally put out the odd gem. And it came to pass in September 1991 that Acclaim released a fine title amidst their usual tranche of commercially high-profile but utterly abysmal games. That game was a conversion of the successful arcade hit Smash TV for the then-ageing (and now 30-year old) Nintendo Entertainment System.

As you can see from this short video, Smash TV is a kill-or-be-killed shooter in the mould of the classic 1982 Robotron 2084 coin-op. This is no accident - Smash TV first appeared in arcades as a re-boot designed and published by Williams, the creators of Robotron.

Smash TV slotted very nicely into the late 80s/early 90s action schlock that framed the cultural horizon of many a teenaged boy. Taking more than a leaf out of the silly Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, The Running Man, you are a contestant in an ultra-violent game show. The basic aim is to move from room to room, blast away the waves of enemies the game throws at you and make your way to the obligatory end-of-level boss. Along the way you can pick up a variety of time-limited weapons and power-ups. You rack up the points by collecting cash and prizes - among which include holidays, VCR's, sit-on lawn mowers, and roadsters. All very Bullseye.

The NES version could never hope to hold a candle to the arcade original in terms of graphics and sound, but the gameplay is almost perfectly replicated. The developers really pushed the creaking hardware to ensure mobs of enemies appear on screen at once. At times it can be almost too much as club-wielding thugs, robots, and drones crowd in on you. But there is satisfaction to be had by running over a three-way shot or a rocket launcher and despatching the cloying hordes to silicon hell.

The only real gameplay gripe is the control system. If you have two pads (like me), you can use both - one to control the direction of travel and the other to aim your gun (replicating the dual joystick controls of the arcade). That is the best way to enjoy the game. If you have to rely on one, matters are slightly trickier - one button fires while the other shoots in the opposite direction. It does take some getting used to and works okayish, the results are still playable. However, for some reason a similar method did not work so well for Acclaim's abysmal ports to Sega's Mega Drive, Master System and Game Gear.

Smash TV is a game that relentlessly tests your reflexes. It requires very little in the way of thought, so it's not the easiest to get chin-strokey about (unlike more modern games). But perhaps a deep, subversive comment can be dug out from the NES game's bits 'n' bleeps.

Returning to The Running Man, the film has Arnie fighting the corrupt propaganda machine of corporate capitalism through a series of violently entertaining set-pieces. It's a theme well trodden in American culture - shit happens, and a hero resorts to guns and bullets to restore justice and get the girl back.

Smash TV is a peculiar departure from this tried and tested path. Unlike Arnold, who was a victim in the Running Man's universe, your anonymous character is a contestant. He is not fighting for his and others' freedom. You're guiding him waist-deep through gallons of guts for "BIG MONEY, BIG PRIZES" (as the garbled in-game speech puts it). In other words, the violence is just a means to acquisitive ends. Piling up the bodies = piling up the toasters. What Smash TV lays bare is commodity fetishism, in the non-Marxist sense; of the desire to own more and more stuff simply because owning more and more stuff is good. Given the mindless nature of the gameplay, you unthinkingly accept the parameters of the game to amass that all-important high score, up to and including running from one end of the room to the other to pick up the prize before it disappears - almost regardless of the enemies mobbing you. Your lives (you can acquire up to nine) are entirely subordinate to a process of accumulation that measures success in cash and property collected.

Who knew a little-remembered shoot 'em up on the NES could offer an apposite diagnosis of the psychology of consumer capitalism in the early 90s?

NES Smash TV is available on various emulators. Or, if you're sad (like me), you can trying hunting the original down on cartridge at a car boot sale near you.

A contemporary review can be read here.