The Virtual Stoa

Sorry about the long delay between episodes six and seven. Perhaps we can get back on track. Now, where were we?

Labour Defended, &c., Episode Seven

[Previous Episodes: One, Two, Three, Four, Five and Six.]

Without troubling myself to quote more passages from these authors, or to transcribe the opinion of other writers, I shall proceed TO EXAMINE THE EFFECTS OF CAPITAL; AND I SHALL BEGIN WITH CIRCULATING CAPITAL. Mr M’Culloch says, “without circulating capital,” meaning the food the labourer consumes, and the clothing he wears; “the labourer never could engage in any undertaking which did not yield an almost immediate return.” Afterwards, he says, “that division of labour is a consequence of previous accumulation of capital;” and quotes the following passage from Dr Smith, as a proper expression for his own opinions.

“Before labour can be divided, ‘A stock of goods of different kinds must be stored up somewhere, sufficient to maintain the labourer, and to supply him with the materials and tools for carrying on his work. A weaver, for example, could not apply himself entirely to his peculiar business, unless there was beforehand stored up somewhere, either in his own possession, or in that of some other person, a stock sufficient for his maintenance, and for supplying him with the materials and implements required to carry on his work, till he has not only completed, but sold his web. This accumulation must evidently be previous to his applying himself for so long a time to a peculiar business.’”

The only advantage of circulating capital, is, that by it the LABOURER is enabled, he being assured of his present subsistence, to direct his power to the greatest advantage. HE has time to learn an art, and his labour is rendered more productive when directed by skill. Being ASSURED of immediate subsistence he can ascertain which, with his peculiar knowledge and acquirements, and with reference to the wants of society, is the best method of labouring, and he can labour in this manner. Unless there were this ASSURANCE there could be no continuous thought, no invention, and no knowledge but that which would be necessary for the supply of our immediate animal wants. The weaver, I admit, could not complete his web, nor would the shipwright begin to build his ship, unless he KNEW that while he was engaged in this labour he should be able to procure food. A merchant certainly could not set out for South America or the East Indies unless he were CONFIDENT that during the period of his absence he and his family could find subsistence, and that he would be able at the end of his voyage to pay all the expenses he had incurred. It is this assurance, this knowledge, this confidence of obtaining subsistence and reward, which enables and induces men to undertake long and complicated operations; and the question is, do men derive this assurance, from a stock of goods already provided, (saved from the produce of previous labour,) and ready to pay them, or from any other source?

I SHALL ENDEAVOUR TO SHOW THAT THIS ASSURANCE ARISES FROM A GENERAL PRINCIPLE IN THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN, AND THAT THE EFFECTS ATTRIBUTED TO A STOCK OF COMMODITIES, UNDER THE NAME OF CIRCULATING CAPITAL, ARE CAUSED BY CO-EXISTING LABOUR.

Yes, it’s from Tim Collins:

A GOVERNMENT THAT WILL DO EXACTLY WHAT IT SAYS ON THE TINSouth Lakes MP Tim Collins has welcomed the publication of Michael Howard’s plans for action within the first day, first week and first month of a Conservative Government. Commenting, Tim Collins said:

“This is a no frills, no nonsense timetable that spells out exactly what a Conservative Government would do to better the lives of everyone in South Lakeland.”

Good for Tim, and good for Michael Howard.(Actually, the press release was from yesterday, but I didn’t hear about it until receiving my email from listening@timcollins.co.uk earlier today.)

Like PooterGeek, I’ve become bored of the internet persona who goes by the name of David Duff, who has posted forty or fifty comments here over the last four weeks. Some of his comments have been fun to have around; the majority have been annoying, trollish, provocative without being interesting, offensive, or on behalf of points of view it isn’t worth anyone’s time to be discussing here (creationists, General Pinochet, Adam Yoshida, et cetera). On this and various other blogs his comments have evinced sexism, racism and homophobia, and attempts to engage him in some kind of dialogue have provoked his distinctive cocktail of irrelevant and false claims and his characteristic double-standards. I know “David Duff” is probably a joke of some kind. It’s just not a very good joke, and it’s now wasting more of my time than I should like.

So he’s earned the distinction of being the first entity not-obviously-a-spambot to be banned from the Virtual Stoa, eighteen months after installing the enetation comments system we use here. I’m banning the various IP addresses he’s been using from the site; if anything does get through signed “David Duff”, can other readers please refrain from responding while I get round to deleting it; and if someone does take to posting the same kind of stuff under a different name, I’ll probably wipe that, too.

UPDATE [11.40am]: What a surprise… The tedious work of banning DD’s IP address strongly suggests that that the person who does “David Duff” has been using multiple names when commenting at the Stoa, including “mikey” (the chap who makes jokes about Stephen Pollard being fat), “fatty” (oddly enough) and “G”. None of these “people” ever had much of interest to say, and I don’t think we’ll be missing their contributions to discussion here.

UPDATE [11.50am]: Matthew Turner writes: “Nearly three years of David Duff free blogging, and the day you ban him he starts commenting on my site…!”

UPDATE [11.55am]: Ah, clicking “block IP address” on Duff comments also has the effect of suppressing them from appearing in the comments boxes themselves, which will make following a few recent threads a bit difficult. (I thought you had to click “delete” to do that.) Still, it’s no great loss. I hope none of you mind too much.

UPDATE [4pm]: First, “mikey” notes in the Comments that he’s not “David Duff”, provides a technological explanation of why I might have thought otherwise which I’m not competent to assess, and seems to have a blog here, which, at a glance, doesn’t have many Duff-like qualities. So I’ll happily admit that that guess of mine was probably wrong, and apologise to Mikey “Fatboy” Delgado for the error. I know I wouldn’t like to be mistaken for David Duff.

Second, I’ve just seen that David Duff has posted this at Matthew Turner’s blog:

I wonder if you would be kind enough to pass on to Chris Brookes that he has no need to put up an electronic bar, I would have left him in socialist tranquility if he had said so directly.More important (to me, at any rate), is my polite request to him that he make clear publicly in his next post my absolute assurance that I never, repeat, never write anything under any name other than my own. (My writing style, ‘a poor thing, but ’tis mine own!’)

I apologise to you for prevailing on your ‘postal’ services in this matter, but obviously, I cannot contact him directly.

Only two errors in this short piece, a trivial misspelling of my name, and a false claim that “obviously, I cannot contact him directly” (when my email address appears on every comment I post at the Stoa and elsewhere). But David wanted this posted, and I’m happy to oblige. And now, with luck, we will never have anything to do with one another ever again ever.

The estimable PooterGeek explains the limits of his tolerance:

For your future reference neither will I pay for people to come here to deny the Holocaust, incite violence, or promote Morris dancing…”

He’s absolutely right, of course.There’s something about Morris dancing that makes me want to hit Morris dancers over the heads with their silly sticks until they stop. One of the few downsides about living in Oxford (apart from the pollution, the traffic, some of the students, some of the tourists and some of the dons and no doubt some other things as well) is that I think we have more than our fair share of Morris dancers, and that they take to the streets on symbolically important occasions like May Day.

Click here for the full text of Tim Collins’s speech to the Conservative Party conference. You know you want to.

One of my minor perversions is a bit of a completeness fetish. Which is why the arrival of a copy of the 1994 edition of the Socialist Register in the post the other day is cause for moderate, temperate celebration: this is the volume that completes my set, from the first issue published in 1964, through to the most recent, 2004 edition.

I started buying the Register regularly in about 1998 or so; then a few years ago I think I picked up a number of back issues from the 60s and 70s fairly cheaply in the second-hand section of the excellent Bookmarks bookshop; and after that I began to work slowly and systematically on plugging the gaps that remained in my run. In the end I stopped looking for cheap copies in the online second-hand book catalogues, and wrote off to the publisher for the last few I needed from the mid-90s, which were all still available. And the last one of those arrived today.

It looks like a good one, too. It kicks off with Ralph Miliband’s essay, “Thirty Years of the Socialist Register, which was the last he published in the journal’s pages before his death on 21 May 1994 (DSW, #95); that’s followed by John Saville’s memoir of E. P. Thompson (DSW, #44) in 1956. And third in the collection is “Richard Rorty and the Righteous among the Nations” by some guy called Norman Geras. Then a bunch of essays about the development of capitalism around the world. The usual stuff that I always mean to get round to reading, but generally don’t.

I only skimmed through the text of Michael Howard’s speech to the Tory Party conference today, and it seemed pretty unimpressive, and, in places, a bit silly. (All that stuff about sacking ministers who miss performance targets, etc.: there’s so little talent or experience in the Conservative parliamentary ranks now that it’s scarcely conceivable that this could be anything other than a content-free publicity stunt. And Matt T, as ever, makes a good point about just who it is that’s saying the stuff about straight talking, politicians’ answers, etc.) I found the final passage a bit moving, even in its somewhat clunky eloquence (”I really do mean it”), but then I’m a sucker for that kind of immigrant narrative (yes, despite everything).

But if I’ve missed anything of substance, please tell me in the Comments, below.

I can’t find the television pictures anywhere around this college, but I have managed to get the radio broadcast from WEEI coming through my computer, and I’m very pleased to report that the Red Sox are leading the Anaheim Angels 8-0 in the middle of the fourth inning in their first play-off game.

And there I was assuming that all the games would take place in the middle of the night, and generally bugger up my schedule.

UPDATE [6.10.2004]: Final score 9-3 Red Sox — and the Twins beat the Yankees 2-0. So a good evening’s baseball all round.

The Guardian’s Newsblog today has branded the Virtual Stoa its pick of the day today.

Apparently, “There is a growing band of UK political bloggers, but The Virtual Stoa is one of the best.”

Thanks, Guardian…

for keeping a Tim Collins Watch going while I haven’t been paying attention. Apparently he (that’s Tim, not Nick) has recently bought a Will Young CD, which is pretty shameful, and has also gone on to insist that it was for his wife, which is worse.

UPDATE [two minutes later]: Now I really am going to throw up. From the same BBC report (at the bottom): “Unveiling the conference set to the strains of remixed Elvis hit “A Little Less Conversation (A Little More Action)”, he [= Dr Liam Fox] said the aim was to be “intimate and engaging”.” Readers! Would you like to be intimate with the contemporary Conservative Party? With which current members would you prefer a little more action?

More to the political point, what planet are these people on?

As the lovely people in the Conservative Party meet for their annual conference, here’s an unfair juxtaposition of the Tory Party’s new logo with a detail from a fascist poster from 1935.

UPDATE [Noon]: So I see over at the Guardian, which has a discussion of the new logo, that Dr Liam Fox says that the new logo signifies “Clarity, Strength and Unity”. So I must be completely wrong to be associating the new-look Tories with the old-style fascists…

It’s good to learn that the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to Steven Sack of Wayne State University and James Gundlach of Auburn University for their 1992 article, “The Effect of Country Music on Suicide”.

Thanks to the magic of JSTOR, I’ve been able to download and read this piece, which contains fine passages, like this one:

Country music may nurture suicide through its theme of alcohol abuse (Chalfant & Beckley 1977; Connors & Alpher 1989, Schaefer 1988). Lyrics often portray drinking as a normal and necessary method of dealing with life’s problems (Chalfant & Beckley 1977). Field research on drinking behavior has linked exposure to country music to increased levels of consumption of alcohol (Schaefer 1988). Alcohol consumption, in turn, has often been associated with increased suicide risk (e.g. Wasserman 1989).Additional themes in country music that might nurture a suicidal mood include financial strain and exploitation at work (Peterson 1991). Often a sense of fatalism or hopelessness is conveyed in these songs. Hopelessness is considered a key psychological state underlying suicide risk (Beck et al. 1985). A sense of bitterness and hopelessness pervades many country songs about farmers, for example. Singing of a man whose farm has been auctioned off, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band notes: “Worked this place all my life, broke my heart, took my wife. Now I got nothing to show” (Peterson 1991:8).

If Stack and Gundlach are right, then 51% of the variance in urban white suicide rates can be explained with reference to the amount of country music played on local radio stations, which sounds pretty alarming to me — and that’s after controlling for other important factors, such as divorce, southernness, poverty and gun ownership.But fortunately, they’re probably not right.

In a follow-up 1994 paper (”‘An Achy Breaky Heart’ May Not Kill You”) published in the same journal, Social Forces, a team of social scientists from Utah State University led by Gary W. Mauk mounted a fierce critique of Stark and Gundlach’s findings: problems with ecological inference, they contended, were compounded by a weak causal model. It looked pretty convincing to me, anyway, on a quick skim. Here’s the best bit:

Further, while Stack and Gundlach found a relationship between amount of country music airtime and suicide rates… they have not accounted adequately for directionality… Likewise, one cannot determine (1) whether whites who are divorced tend to listen to country music, (2) whether listening to country music tends to cause their noncountry music fan spouses to divorce them, or (3) whether country music makes romantic conflict and divorce seem more normal for those individuals who are contemplating suicide, thus increasing the likelihood that they will attempt suicide…

There’s some good bibliography in both articles, too, and I’d very much like to see a copy of Richard A. Peterson, “Changing Class Consciousness in Country Music Lyrics”, a paper presented to the American Sociological Association meeting in Cincinnati in 1991.So I think it’s safe to conclude that you can all go back to watchin’ the bubbles in your beer without any risk of going on to kill yourself.

At least until the rebuttal to the rebuttal gets published somewhere, and then all bets are off.

UPDATE [10.25am]: Here’s a philosophy professor’s handout which discusses this important issue.

UPDATE [10.30am]: Oh, shit, there’s lots more literature on this subject. Hold on while I bring myself up to speed…

UPDATE [noon]: Not much to report, really, from going on to look at Maguire and Snipes (1994), Stack and Gundlach (1994) and Maguire and Snipes (1995), which record a couple of attempts to replicate the original Stack and Gundlach findings, together with a lot of bickering about the data being used, which isn’t very illuminating, nor terribly entertaining, which is a shame. There’s also a Reply to Mauk et al., by Stack and Gundlach (also 1994), which basically responds to the ecological fallacy charge by saying that Durkheim was doing exactly what they were doing in his work on suicide, and, anyway, there’s a good chance that the ecological relationships will hold up in individual-level studies. (See below).

But a follow-up paper to the debate with Snipes and Maguire, “Country Music and Suicide - Individual, Indirect, and Interaction Effects: A Reply to Snipes and Maguire”, by Stack and Gundlach (1995) perhaps pushes the debate forward a bit. Here the authors get hold of the individual level data from the General Social Survey, which, happily, began asking about music preferences in 1993, and this will help them to sidestep a chunk of Mauk et al’s criticism. Now, there may be a problem with this kind of data, as “By 1993 country’s audience had grown and, according to our critics, had become more middle class in its orientation. Any relationship between country and suicide risk factors may have disappeared, or become weaker…” But they’ll see what they can do.

The GSS figures report that 27.4% of country fans report marital disruption as opposed to only 18.4% of nonfans, and they’re quite a bit more likely (61.8% to 40.2%) to have a gun at home, too, as Table Two, “The Relationship between Musical Preference and Having a Gun in the Home, 1993″ clearly shows. But with the new figures they’re using no longer suggesting a straightforward relationship between the amount of country coming through the radio and the tendency of whites to top themselves, they explore a different angle, suggesting that “country music might be associated with suicide through indirect effects, as well as interaction effects… For example, given its preoccupation with the travails of love, it is conceivable that country might be predictive of urban divorce rates”. And, yes, a simple regression shows that “country music had the strongest relationship to divorce” and that “divorce, in turn, is the strongest predictor of suicide.” My goodness. And among the divorced population itself, the authors hypothesize, those who like country music might be the ones more likely to kill themselves, as “divorced people would be the most apt to be receptive to the sad messages in such songs”. Indeed.

Well, all of these thoughts, more or less, are translated into a regression model, this time “with a multiplicative term, divorce x country music”, and this term turns out to be statistically significant, allowing them to suggest that there’s going to be a higher suicide rate than you might otherwise expect in cities which have both a high divorce rate and a lot of country music in them. (San Francisco’s the great outlier here: not much country music and a massive suicide rate. But don’t expect statistical models that work in the rest of the USA to apply to San Francisco…)

And the paper concludes by calling for more research, including fresh content analyses of country lyrics, too see if the songs are getting less sad as the middle class audience share increases, investigation into rural suicides and their listening habits, and, the paper ends, “Possibly the rap music subculture might foster a high incidence of black youth suicide in urban areas”. At least five articles in that project, I dare say.

OK. I think that’s it for the country music and suicide lit review, but if I come across more, I’ll post it soon, though probably not as yet another update, as this is getting out of hand.

UPDATE [12.30pm]: You don’t need the magic of JSTOR to get most of these articles. This page has links to most of the articles mentioned above, as part of an assignment for sociology students. Scroll down to the bottom, if you’re interested.

Right, I’m off to have lunch with PooterGeek.

Seeing that the Iraqi Federation of Workers’ Trade Unions is all the rage these days, I’ll just link to this snippet from the IFTU sort-of blog last week marking the recent meeting of the comrades in the Oxford Labour Party, which was addressed by an IFTU representative. I wasn’t able to be there, but it’s good to hear that it seems to have gone down well on both sides.

Can someone who knows more about retail than I do explain why there’s almost always a big sale of some kind going on at HMV? Is the whole selling CDs and DVDs business in perpetual crisis of some kind, or is this just a cunning (and successful) way of getting me to spend a lot of money in the shop, as I pick up things for around £5 per disc that are supposed to sell for a lot more than that?

Googlebomb Update: We’re now up to fourth and fifth place for the googlebomb on British National Party…

One more heave!