Category: Uncategorized

You get up in the morning, have a spot of breakfast, look at the paper, then get yourself together. You go online. One thing that can happen very quickly is that you see a lot of items which you don’t want to read. Seumas Milne, Simon Jenkins, Jonathan Steele, Priyamvada Gopal, Glenn Greenwald, John Pilger. Sorry about the gender imbalance there. (Whatever became of Our Lady of the Sorrows, Madeleine Bunting?) But, anyway, how to cope? Who to not-read when there are many of them jockeying for position at the same time? Easy, you will say; you just don’t read them all. But that is to confuse the logic of not reading a number of things simultaneously with the logic of not-reading something – which is more active and tending to exclusivity.

Let me offer you an analogy. Suppose that on the grounds that you are indisposed, you want to not-accept three invitations for events taking place at the same time – let us say, to a garden party, a lecture, and a piano recital. You could, of course, decline all three invitations by saying – as is true – that you are ill. But there would be an element of fraudulence involved. Should those inviting you happen to know one another and learn of the relevant facts, they would know that had you been well, you could only have accepted one of their invitations; two of them, consequently, you have declined not really because of being indisposed.

Let me offer you another analogy. Suppose you don’t want to get involved in a Royal Wedding, and you don’t want to get involved in a sporting event taking place at the same time as that Royal Wedding. Well, you could not get involved in both, just like that. They’re all over the papers and on TV and Twitter. But you just avert your gaze and get on with something else: you read a novel, watch a movie, go for a walk. That’s the logic of not getting involved. But it’s different from the logic of not-getting-involved, where what you want to do is to demonstrate your non-involvement by, for example, turning your back on the event or moaning about its taking up so much attention. In this sort of instance there are only so many events you can not-get-involved in simultaneously, since not-getting-involved involves time and effort.

Just so with not-reading as opposed to not reading. The former requires desisting from the act with a certain attitude and degree of commitment. No, I won’t be reading this latest column by Greenwald and I’ll not-read it first, before not-reading Jenkins’s latest or Gopal’s etc. You see? It takes a definite act – or non-act – blocking off other competing ones that would occupy the same time slot. More complicated still does the whole business become if you’re ever so slightly tempted not to not-read the columnist in question. What if his or her column should contain something laughable? Actually, that’s not such a big temptation; the occurrence is too common. But what if it contains a real logical or ideological gem of some kind? You never know, so you have to weigh the odds.

I hope you now understand the terrain better. You can’t just simultaneously not-read everything you don’t want to read.

I wonder what those who relish telling the world that progress is a myth, and commitment to trying to achieve it a vain hope, would make of this report on ‘schoolgirls demanding an end to child labor, child marriage and child trafficking’:

Once cowed and silent, these young civil rights leaders in the making have become defiant and assertive, and they are linking up across the world to demand justice for the 32 million girls and 29 million boys still denied places at school.
…..
Every year 10 million girls marry between the ages of 11 and 13. Fifteen million children are condemned to working full time in mines and sweatshops, on farms and as domestic labor.

That’s millions of children – denied education, married off willy-nilly, and trapped in forms of coerced labour. The piece is by Gordon Brown, former PM and now UN special envoy for global education. It identifies a global injustice which any but the most blinkered moral consciousness would want to see addressed and brought to an end.

This has already been all over Facebook, but since Facebook is a zone that some visitors here do not inhabit, I’d like to highlight, as a footnote to yesterday’s item about the legalization of same-sex marriage in New Zealand, the speech by Maurice Williamson in New Zealand’s parliament. It’s definitely worth four minutes of your time.

‘We are allowing two people who love each other to have that recognized… The sun will still rise tomorrow.’

[This is the fourth in a series of excerpts from the joint paper by Mark Harvey and me ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’. The first three excerpts are here, here and here. The present excerpt is abbreviated from a longer discussion of capitalism and slavery in section II of the paper. At the end of this post there’s a link to a full PDF version of ‘Marx’s economy and beyond’; it contains the footnotes omitted from these blogpost excerpts. – NG.]

So far, we have been considering economies of wage labour, predominantly in Europe, in our critique of the closed commodity economy of ‘free’ labour conceptualized in Marx’s labour theory of value. One of the main strands of this critique has been the varied ways in which such economies of labour have been politically as well as economically instituted, entailing legal constraints on exchange, different rights to the use of labour-power in production, and different political constructions of the labour force through school leaving and retirement ages. There is no general form, in other words, no capitalism-universal logic, to the economies of wage labour.

However, the assumption enshrined in Marx’s Capital is that capitalism is almost defined as being based on the emergence, and then universalization, of economies of ‘free’ wage labour, with the dissolution of forms of feudal bondage. Yet, of all the historical and geographical varieties of instituted economies of labour that developed with industrial capitalism – some would argue, indeed, as a precondition for this development – the new economies of forced labour in the plantation economies of Latin America, the Caribbean and North America diverged the most from the presumption of ‘free’ waged labour. Modern industrial-scale slavery in those regions, built on a slave trade of some 15 to 18 million African slaves, constituted one of the greatest historical movements of labour, and it was followed by an equally modernized form of indentured labour from India, with a further 2 to 3 million persons being transferred under various degrees of compulsion and bondage.

Marx was well aware of the phenomenon, from 1847 when he wrote The Poverty of Philosophy through to Capital, the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value. Moreover, though not offering a developed analysis, he acknowledged three key aspects of slave plantation economies: first, they were modern and not the archaic remnants of an earlier mode of production; second, they were capitalist (not solely the outcome of ‘primitive’ accumulation), even, he wrote, producing surplus value; and, third, they were absolutely critical to European, and especially English, manufacturing capital, producing cotton for the archetypical capitalist industry in the Lancashire mills. Marx was particularly emphatic on the modernity and originality of the North American slave economy, as one written, he suggested, on a tabula rasa, rather than carrying the burden of historical institutions. He even went so far as to say that ‘the veiled slavery of the wage-labourers in Europe needed the unqualified slavery of the New World as its pedestal‘ (our emphasis).

Yet, in spite of allotting to slavery so important a role, references to it by Marx are sparse, and in contrast to the wealth of empirical detail deployed in setting out the labour theory of value, they are detached and absent from his core analysis of capitalism. Indeed, at points Marx does describe the plantation owners in America as capitalists; but they are also ‘anomalies within a world market based on free labour.’ For Marx, as we have seen, a foundational assumption is that the capitalist mode of production is based on free wage labour. Slavery, although capitalist, was not free labour, and just did not fit the assumptions of his analysis. So, this major historical phenomenon of the 19th (and the 20th) century is excluded from it.

Of course, there is much that Marx did not know, and could not know at that time, about the various economies of forced labour and their historical co-development with industrial capitalism. He relied heavily on secondary sources, since much discredited (for example, on J.E. Cairnes’s The Slave Power). It is now quite widely recognized that the plantation economies of the New World were critical in bringing about the ‘great divergence’ between the then vibrant economies of the East, and the industrial capitalisms of Europe and North America. Apart from the availability of cheap and appropriate coal in England, the colonies provided key resources in sugar (calories), raw material for clothing, timber and other materials, thereby uniquely relieving Europe of a critical pressure on land. Without the vast expansion of land resources, it simply would not have been possible to clothe and feed a level of population, especially an increasingly urban one, in the emerging industrial centres. Europe, and in particular England, escaped the land constraints faced by other world economies of the epoch. This economic growth both drove and depended on the expansion of slave plantation economies. By 1860, just before the American Civil War, over 90 per cent of cotton for the English textile mills was produced by slaves in America. Moreover, the growth of world commodity markets, in which the slave trade and products of slave plantations were key components, was intricately woven into the development of finance capital and financial services industries, a leading edge of commodity market economies.
…..
But were slavery and indentured labour just transitional forms, inevitably to be superseded by free wage labour? In one sense that is obviously the case, although, as we have argued, it applies equally to many forms of ‘free’ wage labour in industrial capitalisms; they too, for their part, no longer exist. However, it also has to be said, the disappearance of slavery and indentured labour took a very long time within the historical development of industrial capitalism – slavery lasting until 1860 in America; 1886 in Cuba and 1888 in Brazil; and indentured labour in plantation economies, British and other, until 1920. Moreover, as already emphasized, if they were transitional forms, they were modern ones, born and developed with and alongside industrial wage labour economies, in a combined and complex economic dynamic. They were definitively not relics of previous modes of production. Finally, and critically, they did not just disappear because of the competitive economic superiority of free wage labour in a global market economy. Just as they were politically instituted, so politics and civil war disestablished them. Acts of Emancipation not market forces freed slaves in British colonies. Military defeat by the North over the slave political economies of the South, economically thriving and expanding in the decades immediately preceding the war, brought an end to that particular form of slave economy of labour. Political protest, both led by Ghandi in South Africa and by political movements in India, forced the British Government finally to terminate the systematic exportation of indentured labour from that country. These forms of forced labour were not economically incompatible with capitalism, but politically and morally incompatible with certain political institutions and developing norms. But then, as we have argued, free wage labour economies are also not closed market systems, nor autonomous in their constitution. And to this day, throughout the history of the twentieth century and in many parts of the world, we need no reminders of the narrowly economic compatibility of forced labour, child and adult, with modern capitalist productive systems. Whether in China, Indonesia, India or Vietnam (to point only to a few obvious cases), some of the most advanced production units of contemporary multi-national capitalist enterprises engage labour under conditions of forced constraint, debt bondage, or child servitude. There is no implacable, purely economic logic, as suggested by Adam Smith, that formally ‘free’ wage labour will outcompete and hence eradicate the many varieties and degrees of servitude. Capitalism is far from bounded by a Benthamite ‘freedom, property, and equality’ before the law.

So, although indeed transitional in a limited sense, the epoch of slavery and indentured economies of labour presents the most powerful empirical refutation of the narrow vision of the economy of capitalism enshrined in the labour theory of value. It also, as importantly, reveals an analytic failure to incorporate known realities into an adequate theoretical framework. To say that slavery and indentured labour are anomalies within capitalism is like saying that whales do not belong in the oceans.

[I shall post one further excerpt at the end of the week. For the full paper (PDF), ‘Marx’s economy and beyond‘, click through the link. See also ‘On working together‘.]

Giles Fraser makes a confession:

I voted for Margaret Thatcher. We all decided down the pub that this was the best way forward. Forget the Labour party and their pathetic version of incremental change. What was required was nothing less than a revolution. And in order to bring this about, things had to get a good deal worse. That was the logic: a Thatcher government would trigger a general uprising against the inequalities created by free-market capitalism. I know, I know – the foolishness of youth. It was a stupid idea. But it was a bizarre measure of the extent to which I hated Thatcherism as a philosophy that I was prepared even to vote for Thatcher to defeat it.

Bizarre is right. For I too have been young (though you may not believe it), and there are follies in my past which might have been due in part to my youth. But that particular folly – that we should try to make things better by contributing to making them worse first – never. Wherever does it come from? Think of other spheres of human endeavour. War: we’ll help the enemy win, the better to prevail once we’ve been crushed. Literature: I’m going to start my book with three really incoherent and badly written chapters. Personal relations: I’ll be horrible for a few years, so that they’ll appreciate me all the more later. Sport: let’s lose a couple of Tests so as to make the opposition complacent. And so on.

In politics the folly is compounded by considerations specific to that domain. One: a political defeat can sometimes be calamitous, something your ‘side’ doesn’t recover from for years or even decades. Two: the interests of real people are at stake; how can you credibly claim to have their interests at heart if you’re willing to sacrifice them as an exercise in political education? The assumption, moreover, that everything will be revealed by a political reverse, a period of suffering, or what have you, betokens a view of the world in which the truth is just sitting there waiting to be grasped. Things are always much harder than that.

So foolishness indeed, but a lot of young people manage to avoid it.

The paper I wrote recently on this topic – ‘Staying home: G.A. Cohen and the motivational basis of socialism’ – appears in the forthcoming issue of the journal Contemporary Politics. The publishers have already posted an electronic version of it. Those with access to their website (via a university library, for example) can download the paper here.

New Zealand has just done itself credit by legalizing same-sex marriage. It’s ‘the first country in the Asia-Pacific region to do so’. In the process it has also brought forth a new effort at silliness in opposing same-sex marriage. This one is due to Professor Rex Ahdar of the Faculty of Law, University of Otago, and it is at least novel in trying to add some philosophical depth to the argument against change.

What is this Ahdarian depth? It consists of holding that there is a ‘true nature’ or ‘true essence’ of marriage – being the conjugal model in which ‘marriage is a lifelong union between a man and a woman’ – such that opposite-sex unions are a ‘real phenomenon, not just a human invention or convention’. This is similar to the fact, Ahdar says, that while ‘a crocodile is a crocodile, a tree is a tree’. Yes, that is indeed so. Even if we decided to have a single word covering both crocodiles and trees, there would remain a natural difference between the one type of thing and the other. And there are also, of course, differences between same-sex and opposite-sex unions, as suggested by the qualifiers. But where does it come from that only one type here may be called ‘marriage’ and included under a given set of legal conventions and procedures? Who decided this? Ahdar again: ‘We did. We decided that marriage involves the comprehensive sexual union of a man and a woman’ – we being ‘every culture, tribe and race since antiquity etc.’ So then we can decide afresh, no?

Apparently no. Why not? Because, says the man, earlier ages didn’t get it wrong. Or, at any rate, he thinks not. Just like the natural difference between a crocodile and a tree, the social bond of marriage has to remain forever what it was because Ahdar thinks previous ages got things right on this score. His ‘deeper’ philosophical argument, in other words, amounts to no more than the unsupported opinion that an existing institution shouldn’t be changed.

For a contrast read the column by Fintan O’Toole here:

I don’t respect the arguments against gay marriage. I don’t respect them because I don’t think they are really arguments at all. They are a pseudo-rational veneer on irrational prejudice.

(Thanks: AW and CT.)

Do you want an impression of how things might be should humankind ever perish from the earth? Take a look at these truly beautiful abandoned places. First, Kolmanskop in the Namib Desert.

Next, Czestochowa, an ex-train depot in Poland.

More here.

Bee Wilson is a food writer, author and reviewer. Her latest book was Consider the Fork: A History of Invention in the Kitchen. She has been named food journalist of the year three times by the Guild of Food Writers. Here Bee writes about Russell Hoban’s Bread and Jam for Frances.

Bee Wilson on Bread and Jam for Frances by Russell Hoban

‘One of the reasons I like bread and jam’, said Frances, ‘is that it does not slide off your spoon in a funny way’.

Russell Hoban’s Bread and Jam for Frances (with pictures by Lillian Hoban), first published in 1964, is an authentic tragicomic account of what it feels like to be a child who is fussy about food – an experience common to almost everyone during the first few years of life. Frances, who comes from a family of humanoid badgers, only likes to eat bread and jam.

To start with, her parents try to make her try different foods: soft boiled eggs and sunny-side up eggs and nutritious meals of breaded veal cutlets with baked potatoes and runner beans. But then they appear to give up, allowing her to eat nothing but bread and jam at every meal. At first, the freedom is thrilling. Frances no longer has to swop her packed lunch with her greedy friend Albert because she already has what she wants. But the endless diet of jam starts to pall, until eventually she breaks down in tears and begs to be given some spaghetti and meatballs.

‘She sang so softly that Mother and Father could scarcely hear her:
What I am
Is tired of jam‘.

I was born 10 years after the book first appeared and my mother read it many times to me and my sister, along with the other Frances books, all of them brilliantly understated psychological explorations of childhood problems such as sibling rivary (A Baby Sister for Frances and A Birthday for Frances) or the vicious psychodramas of female friendship (A Bargain for Frances). I’ve since returned to the Frances books with my own children and they deepen with each reading. As a child, I identified with Frances and her raw ego. As a parent, I am struck by the humour and tolerance of ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’, who are given such kind and wise faces in Lillian Hoban’s illustrations. More recently, I was doing some research on childhood neophobia (fear of new foods) and the psychology of eating and realized that the Hobans had prefigured by several decades a great deal of academic work on disgust and the acquisition of childhood tastes.

‘She won’t try anything new’, said Mother to Father. It is generally accepted that one of the strongest ways to overcome neophobia of most foods is ‘mere exposure’: trying a food on numerous occasions. But the hard part – as Mother and Father find – can be getting a child to try something at all. Paul Rozin among others has written many papers on disgust as one of the most primal and powerful of human emotions. The original purpose of disgust would have been survival. A child faced with a new food often treats it with the same wariness an adult would accord to poison.

Hoban, who died in 2011, and who is mainly remembered for his often supernatural adult novels, captures brilliantly the horror Frances feels in relation to eggs. Explaining to her father why she won’t eat them she remarks ‘sunny-side-up eggs lie on the plate and look up at you in a funny way. And sunny-side-down eggs just lie on their stomachs and wait‘. By contrast, when she eats bread and jam, ‘I always know what I am getting, and I am always pleased’.

Recently, there have been many more picture books on the theme of fussy eaters, but they tend to focus more on the food than on the reasons for eating or not eating it. I found one in the public library the other day about a princess who wouldn’t try salad. It had zero psychological nuance. This princess won’t eat and won’t eat until she grows her own tomatoes and discovers they are actually yummy. Eh voila! A happy ending, that could come from a government-issued healthy eating pamphlet.

There is nothing so pat in Bread and Jam for Frances. Hoban depicts Frances’s reluctance to try new foods as part of a family dynamic. He shows us how alienated a picky eater might feel to belong to a family of omnivores, where Father greets each meal with booming approval and even little baby Gloria in her high chair gobbles up eggs and likes to ‘practise with a string bean’. At the beginning of the book, Frances thinks that what she wants is to be left in peace to eat bread and jam. But it turns out that what she really needs is to find a way to join the happy throng of omnivores, without feeling coerced into it.

Hoban’s writing is not remotely sentimental. He does not expose Frances’s emotions, but leaves us to infer them from her actions. We know that she is tiring of jam because each time she goes out skipping, she skips a little slower. And there is a subtle twist. The real problem, it turns out, is people not food. Father wants Frances not to reject foods when she hasn’t even tried them. But as she tearfully asks for spaghetti she asks ‘How do you know what I’ll like if you won’t even try me?’ Being pigeon-holed as the person in a family who only eats jam is a fate lonelier than being encouraged to eat disgusting eggs.

The final scene, of neophobia overcome, is richly satisfying. Frances lays out an elaborate packed lunch of cream of tomato soup in a thermos, lobster-salad sandwich, celery carrot sticks and black olives with a tiny vase of violets on a paper doily. And she eats a bite of each in turn to make ‘the lobster-salad sandwich, the celery, the carrot sticks, and the olives come out even’. In a book about the vagaries of appetite, Hoban’s prose has the power to summon it. Reading Bread and Jam for Frances always makes me hungry, in the nicest way.

[All the pieces that have appeared in this series, with the links to them, are listed in the index here.]

I’ve not tasted much sporting glory in my life as a player. But for one season I was in Northlea School’s First XV rugby team. Here is the evidence.

And here is who we all are:

Back row: Dave Halley, Noel Flanagan, Hercules Van Tonder, Lennie Pascoe.
Middle row: Philip or Rowland Simpson, Norman Geras, Dave Muzzell, Peter Hutcheon, Nige Scott, Rodney Whyte, Trevor McKenzie.
Front row: Johnny Spence, Ray Suttle (Coach), Mike Shaw, Don Berger (Captain), Bruce Scott, Mr Owen (Headmaster), Paul Shepherd.

I say something about it all in this old post.