Backword Dave reminds me in a comments thread below (is it a “thread” if it only has two comments?) to say that it was splendid to eat and drink with both him and Crooked Timber’s Chris Bertram in Bristol on Monday Wednesday [can’t even remember what bloody day of the week it was].
Chris Lightfoot has a brand new estimation quiz. I think it’s quite hard. Well, I only scored 43%, so I hope it’s quite hard.
W. E. B. Du Bois, activist and author of The Souls of Black Folks (1903), born, Massachusetts, 23 February 1868; died, Ghana, 27 August, 1963.
It’s still not too late to vote in Tim’s special on-line tax relief referendum. Hurry.
… to “The Thinker”, an exciting and innovative, though regrettably defunct blog run by Paul “The Thinker” Richards, which started life a year ago today.
You can read the inaugural post here, which ended with the words, “The Thinker. Good ideas. Great writing. Making the rest play catch up.”
Yes, that’s Leader of the Opposition Michael Howard earlier today, speaking to the issues that matter.
Oliver Burkeman is helpful on the subject.
Kathy Wilkes, philosopher and friend of Eastern Europe, born 23 June 1946, died 21 August 2003.
Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party for a surprisingly long time, b. 26 March 1893; d. 21 August 1964.
Leon Trotsky, b. 7 November 1879, Yanovka, Russia; d. 21 August 1940, Mexico City. Last year the Guardian reprinted its contemporary reportage, and I mistakenly listed Trotsky as a dead 20 August socialist, for which, apologies.
Quite a bit to get through, and this part doesn’t really need any introducing, so let’s have another tranche of Hodgskin’s opening passages.
Labour Defended, &c. Episode Three
(Follow these links for Episode One and Episode Two.)
Combination is of itself no crime; on the contrary, it is the principle on which societies are held together. When the government supposes its existence threatened, or the country in danger, it calls on us all to combine for its protection. “Combinations of workmen,” however, it says, through Mr. Huskisson, “must be put down.” Frequently has it contracted alliances with other governments or made combinations to carry on war and shed blood; frequently has it called on the whole nation to combine when the object has been to plunder and massacre the unoffending subjects of some neighbouring state; and frequently have such combinations had heaped on them all the epithets of the vocabulary of glory. No other combination seems unjust or mischievous, in the view of government, but our combinations to obtain a proper reward for our labour. It is a heinous crime in the eyes of a legislature, composed exclusively of capitalists and landlords, and representing no other interests than their own, for us to try, by any means, to obtain for ourselves, and for the comfortable subsistence of our families, a larger share of our own produce than these our masters choose to allow us. All the moral evils that ever plagued a society have been anticipated by the Ministers from our persevering in our claims. To put down combination they have departed from principles held sacred for upwards of 200 years. They have made also a law handing us over to the magistrates like vagabonds and thieves, and we are to be condemned almost unheard, and without the privilege and formality of a public trial.
All that we are compelled to suffer, all that we have had inflicted on us, has been done for the advantage of capital. “Capital,” says Mr. Huskisson, “will be terrified out of the country, and the misguided workmen, unless they are stopped in time, will bring ruin on themselves and on us.” “Capital,” says the Marquis of Lansdown, “must be protected. If its operations be not left free, if they are to be controuled by bodies of workmen it will leave this for some more favoured country.” Capital, if we believe these politicians, has improved England, and the want of capital is the cause of the poverty and sufferings of Ireland. Under the influence of such notions, no laws for the protection of capital are thought too severe, and few or no persons, except the labourer, see either impropriety or injustice in the fashionable mode of despising his claims, and laughing at his distresses.
In fact the legislature, the public at large, and especially our employers, decide on our claims solely by a reference to the former condition of the labourer, or to his condition in other countries. We are told to be contented, because we are not quite as badly off as the ragged Irish peasants who are suffering under a more grievous system even than the one which afflicts us. By them also we are destined to suffer; for they are imported here in crowds, and beat down the wages of our labour. We can have no hope, therefore, either of convincing the public or of calling the blush of shame into the cheek of those who are opulent by our toils, and who deride the poverty and sufferings they cause, by referring to the customs of any other society, either in times past or present. To obtain better treatment the labourers must appeal from practice to principle. We must put out of view how labour has been paid in times past, and how it is now paid in other countries, and we must show how it ought to be paid. This I admit is a difficult task, but the former condition of the labourer in this country, and his condition at present in other countries, leaving us no criterion to which we can or ought to appeal, we must endeavour to perform it.
Who was Thomas Hodgskin? Here are the barest of bones, mostly lightly summarised from the introduction to David Reisman’s edition (mentioned in Episode One below).
Thomas Hodgskin was born 12 December 1787, left school at twelve and went to sea, serving twelve years in the Navy before retiring on half pay in 1812. He wasn’t happy with the Navy, and said so in his first published work, An Essay on Naval Discipline (1813). In this 50,000 word polemic, Hodgskin presented himself to the public “as a discontented and disappointed man” and went on to describe and denounce the entire system of discipline in the Navy, repeatedly returning to the idea that the despotic organisation and practices in the Navy stood in sharp and ultimately damaging contradiction to the politics of a free state.
Waterloo opened up the continent again, and Hodgskin travelled extensively in Europe, marrying a German woman in Hanover, returning to Britain in 1818, and publishing in 1820 his two volume Travels in the north of Germany, describing the present state of the social and political institutions, the agriculture, manufactures, commerce, education, arts and manners in that country, particularly in the Kingdom of Hanover. As some of my students sometimes say to me these days, this does just what it says on the tin, but — sadly — does not appear to be anywhere online. In particular, the Travels defended the laissez-faire (lack of?) organisation of modern society, and attacked the over-regulation of German society by government, as well as setting forth his view that “capital is the product of labour, and profit is nothing but a portion of that produce, uncharitably extracted…”
Based in Britain from 1818, Hodgskin studied Ricardo’s economics, set out in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), had a not particularly happy spell in Edinburgh, 1819-1822, and returned to London in 1822 in order to work as Parliamentary correspondent for the Morning Chronicle. There he became involved in a significant working-class education initiative, the Mechanics’ Institute, and its associated magazine, and it was during his association with these institutions that he published in 1825 his most celebrated work, Labour Defended….
More by way of background, perhaps, later. Let’s have a bit more of the text now, the opening three paragraphs, following on from the previously-posted “Notice”…
Labour Defended, &c., Episode Two
[Episode One was posted here]
Throughout this country at present, there exists a serious contest between capital and labour. The journeymen of almost every trade have combined to obtain higher wages; and their employers have appealed to the legislature for protection. The contest is not only one of physical endurance, or who can stand out longest, but of argument and reason. It is possible for the workmen to force their masters into compliance, but they must convince the public of the justice of their demands. The Press has, at present a great influence over public questions; and by far the greater and more influential part of it is engaged on the side of the capitalist. Through it, however, and through public opinion, must the journeymen find their way to the legislature. They may possibly terrify their masters, but they can only obtain the support of any influential persons by an appeal to reason. To suggest some arguments in favour of labour, and against capital, is my chief motive for publishing the present pamphlet.
The labourers are very unfortunate, I conceive, in being surrounded by nations in a worse political condition than we are; and in some of which labour is still worse paid than here. Labourers are still more unfortunate in being descended from bondsmen and cerfs [sic]. Personal slavery or villanage formerly existed in Britain, and all the living labourers still suffer from the bondage of their ancestors. Our claims are consequently never tried by the principles of justice. The lawgiver and the capitalist always compare our wages with the wages of other labourers; and without adverting to what we produce, which seems the only criterion by which we ought to be paid, we are instantly condemned as insolent and ungrateful if we ask for more than was enjoyed by the slave of former times, and is now enjoyed by the half-starved slave of other countries.
By our increased skill and knowledge, labour is now probably ten times more productive than it was two hundred years ago; and we are forsooth, to be contended with the same rewards which the bondsmen then received. All the advantages of our improvements go to the capitalist and the landlord. When, denied any share in our increased produce, we combine to obtain it, we are instantly threatened with summary punishment. New laws are fulminated against us, and if these are found insufficient, we are threatened with laws still more severe.
Yesterday I said that I thought that SIAW made a good point against Norm’s claim that the left cannot die “so long as there’s brutality and injustice, desperate poverty and inequality, to be fought”. (Follow the links to read both the claim and the point.)
Norm has questioned that judgment in late-night email, pointing out that he wasn’t trying to offer any kind of complete account of what the left is and why or whether it’s dead in that post, and reminding me that he has a far more developed account of related matters over at his essay on “Minimum Utopia: Ten Theses“, first published in the Socialist Register volume for 2000.
Since it’s a splendid essay, I’m going to urge all of you to trot over and have a read. It’s not long, and it’s conveniently divided into bite-sized chunks (or “theses”) for easy digestion. And it really is very, very good indeed.
Isaac Deutscher, communist, journalist, biographer of Trotsky and Stalin; b. Chrzan�w, 1907, d. Rome, 19 August 1967.
I’ve stumbled across Charlotte Street twice today, once following a link from Norm’s to this post, and then again following up on the Laziness of Johann Hari from his own page to here. And it’s looking very good indeed. Straight onto the blogroll with that one, then.
The “Virtual Stoat”, that is, over here, at Blognor Regis (and which is going straight onto the blogroll).
Don’t miss Chris Lightfoot today, on Oliver Kamm, weapons of mass destruction, identity cards and the information commissioner. It’s good, clean fun.
(Unlike most of the rest of us, Chris limits himself to posting on subjects he knows something about, such as speed cameras, crime figures and identity cards. This is admirable restraint.)
Daniel Davies has noticed, too, which will certainly help the evolution of the relevant google page.
I’ll just note here that his comments box [and scroll down] is also haunted by another ignorant git. There’s a chap called Andrew Ian Dodge who posts nonsense on some of the blogs I read from time to time, such as at Harry’s Place, whom I first noticed when he wandered into my comments box to make an obviously false allegation, and who really outdoes himself this time with this piece of illiterate rubbish:
Yeah never really understood why the left does not give a damn about the Kurds. They get slaughtered (with WMDs no less) and the left actively campaigns against saving them (rather than say staying neutral). While on the other hand, black Africans get killed and we have to rush in and save them.
Thinking back to the time of Halabja, I can remember Kurds protesting, I can remember far-left Trotskyist groups protesting, I can even remember an early-day motion signed by a bunch of mostly left-wing Labour MPs protesting.And I can remember a Tory government in general and David Mellor MP in particular doing their best to ensure that this little atrocity didn’t disrupt the profitable relationship that the British state enjoyed with the Baathists, and very little interest from the back benches of the Conservative Party (or indeed, from the front bench of the Opposition) in what was going on.
I wonder, by contrast, what Andrew Ian Dodge can remember of that time that I have been managing to forget?
(I suspect that the key to understanding Andrew Ian Dodge lies in deciphering this page, which Matthew Turner pointed me towards once upon a time. But I can’t manage to get beyond the first few sentences. Apparently he has a blog with a stupid name over here, though I can’t say I’ve ever read it.)
Jamie, over at Blood and Treasure, has some Very Sensible things to say about A-Levels and about schools in this country, and says them in exactly the right tone of voice.
In The New Republic, dated 1 October 2001, sociology professor Alan Wolfe published a highly critical review of Empire, by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. In this week’s Independent, Johann Hari wrote of his own encounter with the book and with one of its authors. Here’s a snippet from each:
Wolfe: Here, in prose that insults language, is how Hardt and Negri summarize what they have understood: “The analysis of real subsumption, when this is understood as investing not only the economic or only the cultural dimension of society but rather the social bios itself, and when it is attentive to the modalities of disciplinarity and/or control, disrupts the linear and totalitarian figure of capitalist development.”
Hari: Here is a typical Negri sentence, selected at random: “The analysis of real subsumption, when this is understood as investing not only the economic or only the cultural dimension of society but rather the social bios itself, and when it is attentive to the modalities of disciplinarity and/or control, disrupts the linear and totalitarian figure of capitalist development.” After 400 pages of this, I feel like I have been raped by a dictionary of sociology.
Do we believe that Hari is telling the truth when he says that he selected this sentence at random? I’m inclined to believe not.
The odds on picking that particular sentence at random are pretty high: several thousand to one, against. The Wolfe piece is probably the most intelligent of the various hit-pieces that were commissioned on the book within a year or so of its first publication, and one of the better known ones, and so I’d be surprised if Hari’s “research” for his article didn’t extend that far. Hari admits that he struggled with the book, so it wouldn’t be surprising if he sought out and then leant on smarter critics when it came to acquiring opinions about Empire. What do you think?
(The Wolfe piece is no longer freely available at The New Republic, but someone has archived a copy here.)
UPDATE [7.45pm]: I now realise that Johann didn’t even have to read Wolfe’s piece to get his ready-made opinions about Empire; all he had to do to find his particular sentence “at random” was read back through the archives of Harry’s Place, the blog to which he contributes, where he would have found Gene quoting that bit of Wolfe quoting that same bloody bit of Hardt and Negri, and making the same oh-it’s-so-unreadable sneer along the way.
SIAW make an impressive contribution to what they call the non-debate over the life of the left triggered by the recent Nick Cohen piece in the New Statesman, in which they make a number of very good points: that Cohen’s piece is quite muddled, that Norman Geras’s defence of the life and mission of the left is over-generalised [see above], and that “an entity that can expand to include New Labour and the Liberal Democrats, or their equivalents in other polities, then contract, often within the same passage, to exclude everyone but the obscure sect and/or obscurer guru a given writer is loyal to, is probably not worth spending much more time on”.
We disagree, I think, over the interpretation of the scope of what we might (pretentiously) call the Cohen thesis. SIAW expressed the hope that while “dancing on the corpse of the one big left, there are indeed many little ‘lefts’, as Cohen (we hope) was trying to say”, and they list some of them. But I think this hope is misplaced, given Cohen’s remarkable claim towards the end (which I’ve quoted before), that, “unless you believe that the failure of the world’s peoples to look leftwards is all the result of brainwashing by the corporate media, you have to conclude that the left is dead.”
But I think the key to our disagreement over our diagnosis of the life or otherwise of the left can probably be found when SIAW note that the words like liberty, equality, fraternity, solidarity, justice and peace “are the kinds of terms that cause arguments rather than resolve them”, therefore not any kind of key to the unity of the left. But perhaps we should be thinking of the left not as organised around a particular set of strong, contestable interpretations of various value words, but as loosely structured by the existence of the arguments themselves?
SIAW argue that there’s no single, coherent, institutional left, organised by an International around a coherent programme for change. True enough. But why should we leftists be terribly bothered by that?
Again, SIAW write that “the left ‘as a serious political project’ died long ago, some time in the early 1920s if not before, when the deepest division of all - that between reformists and revolutionaries - became set in stone. From that basic division there followed many others, as the ‘left’, far from controlling the currents of history, was buffeted to and fro.” But no left ever “controlled the currents of history” (whatever that might mean) — not the Bolsheviks, not the Second International, not the Jacobins — and the distinction between “reformists and revolutionaries” can be crucial, and sometimes lethal, but if it became “set in stone” and of immense importance in real-world politics, that was only because of the polarising effects of the Bolshevik revolution on the European and, later, world socialist parties. Now that those regimes are consigned to the dustbin of history, there’s no particular reason to allow that distinction to dominate our political thinking any more.
So to come back to SIAW’s direct challenges to me: early on they write:
(On the other hand, it does seem surprisingly sniffy of Chris Brooke - who normally comes across as being unusually free from academic snobbery - to take Cohen to task for restricting himself to Anglophone examples, given that he is, after all, an Anglophone journalist writing a limited-wordage column for Anglophone readers, not a theoretician free to cite sources in several different languages across hundreds of pages, whether he�s read them or not; and, by the way, can Chris, or anyone else, find plausible counter-examples from some non-Anglophone left or other?)
And they repeat the point at the end:
Of course we�d prefer to agree with Chris Brooke that �rumours of death� are �greatly exaggerated� - do you really think that we enjoy looking at the twitching corpse of a tradition that we can only wish was going strong? - but we�re still waiting for those counter-examples.
What can I say? Against the charge of academic snobbery, I plead not guilty. The point of what I wrote wasn’t to convict Cohen of not reading enough difficult theoretical texts in foreign languages — far from it! — but to highlight the problem, or so it seemed to me, of drawing such sweeping conclusions from such parochial examples.And what of the counter-examples? Well, they’re the usual suspects, I’m afraid: the global justice movement, or the “movement of movements”, as it’s sometimes called, and the various bits and pieces that get grouped together under that heading: those who work with refugees, asylum seekers and other migrants; the Brazilian landless workers movement and other land rights movements around the world; the Karnataka State Farmers Association and many other trade unions; ATTAC and the international Social Forums (Fora?) which it’s helped to spawn; Oxfam; the opposition to Robert Mugabe’s thuggish regime (and yes, even some of the neoliberal MDC opposition to Mugabe); the Rawlsians and their leftist critics in the universities; Amnesty International; the Zapatistas; Students United Against Sweatshops and their ilk; the governments of Lula and Hugo Ch�vez (much of the time); European social democratic governments (some of the time, increasingly rarely, in fact); the food sovereignty movement; just about any attempt to redistribute resources from the affluent to the poor; together with the usual spectrum of organisations continuing the long, hard work of liberating and empowering women, sexual minorities, the disabled, indigenous peoples, and so on, and so forth, and so it goes on. You can guess some of the rest.
That’s my left, perhaps it’s even my Left, and it’s one that gives me quite a lot of hope for the future, even if it does get buffeted a bit by the currents of history along the way. But then, how could it not be?
So yesterday I was in the pub with semi-regular Harry’s Place commentator Stephen Marks, and next week I’ll be off to Bristol to eat food with Chris Bertram and Backword Dave, and Norm keeps threatening a visit to Oxford… No wonder they call this the silly season.
But are these examples of the virtual intruding into the real or vice versa?
Responding to this, I’ve just sent in this pretty arbitrary ranking:
1. Macbeth
2. Hamlet
3. King Lear
4. Othello
With the caveats that I agree that Macbeth is really difficult to put on stage, so works better on cassette tape or film (Throne of Blood) than in any staged version I’ve seen, and that Verdi’s Otello is a really fine opera, and I wouldn’t want my (comparatively) low ranking to suggest otherwise…
Favourite Shakespeare play of all: The Winter’s Tale.
Shakespeare play I like that no-one else seems to: Coriolanus.
A few months ago, you may recall, I serialised Oscar Wilde’s essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism”, at the Virtual Stoa, republishing it in bite-sized chunks in order that the blog generation — shortened attention span and all — might enjoy a fresh encounter with something that is both a rather fine piece of writing and a significant and often under-appreciated contribution to the literature of the Left.
I’ve been pondering a sequel for a while now, and the text I keep coming back to is Thomas Hodgskin’s pamphlet, Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, which was first published in London in 1825 and which went on to be considered one of the classics of the so-called Ricardian socialist economics.
For those who want to read ahead, the pamphlet is available elsewhere on the web, for example, here or here. I’ll be basing this blog edition on the text provided by the Avalon Project website at Yale Law School, checking it against the facsimile of the original edition in David Reisman’s recent Pickering edition.
I’ll supply some further background notes at the start of the second instalment, but - there being no time like the present - it’s time to kick off this new serial with the Notice that appears ahead of the main body of the text…
NOTICE
In all the debates on the law passed during the late session of Parliament, on account of the combinations of workmen, much stress is laid on the necessity of protecting capital. What capital performs is therefore a question of considerable importance, which the author was, on this account, induced to examine. As the result of that examination, it is his opinion that all the benefits attributed to capital arise from co-existing and skilled labour. He feels himself, on this account, called on to deny that capital has any just claim to the large share of the national produce now bestowed on it. This large share he has endeavored to show is the cause of the poverty of the labourer; and he ventures to assert that the condition of the labourer can never be permanently improved till he can refute the theory, and is determined to oppose the practice of giving nearly everything to capital.
Pollard writes today in the Sunday Telegraph (as recorded on his blog) that “There is only one story which really gets some commentators’ wickers up and that is that the Blairs have chosen to holiday in homes belonging to Sir Cliff Richard, Prince Girolamo Strozzi and Silvio Berlusconi.”
The claim of substance that he makes in the sentence is obviously false, as so often in Pollard’s writing, but that’s not what bothers me here. Rather it’s the word “wickers”. There’s a phrase “to get on [someone’s] wick” [see OED, “wick”, 2.a.], and this could be a clumsy attempt to render that thought. And I read also that “wicker” as a verb can be used instead of “whicker”, which means to whinny, or “To utter a half-suppressed laugh; to snigger, titter”, which might work in a slightly different context, but not really here, as he’s not really writing about journalists who mock the Blairs.
And Google doesn’t really help either: the main uses of the words “wicker up” seem to be found in furniture catalogues, but again, I don’t think that that’s the metaphor that Pollard’s using.
So is this some horse-racing jargon that Pollard has in his vocabulary to which I’m happily not privy, or is he a master of linguistic invention to whom I should defer?
Or is he illiterate, or am I?
