The human being may be no more real than is a cinematograph film. When the projected light is switched off all that remains is a blank screen. That which has been projected by light was a series of ’stills’. Such also is what is being projected by ‘life’. The more you consider the analogy the more perfect it seems to be: it could help us to understand. – Wei Wu Wei
In Japan, a prisoner on death row wakes up every morning not knowing if he will be executed that day. The prisoner doesn’t know his execution date until the morning it is to be carried out. His family only finds out after the execution has already taken place.
Hakamada Iwao has been on death row for 40 years. 28 of those years have been spent in solitary confinement. He now suffers from mental illness. The basis for his conviction in 1968 was a confession extracted after 20 days of intensive interrogation. He claims he was beaten and forced to sign. One of the judges who convicted him later said he believed him to be innocent. To me, even if he was guilty, this kind of treatment would not be warranted.
I have just sent him a card as part of Amnesty International’s greetings card campaign. Clearly this is a very small gesture, and will not do too much to help him. But it only takes a few minutes and certainly can’t hurt. Here’s what Amnesty says:
The annual Greetings Card Campaign brings people across the world in touch with each other in a simple way – sending a card with a friendly greeting or message of solidarity to someone who is in danger or unjustly imprisoned. These are prisoners of conscience, people under sentence of death, human rights defenders under threat because of their work, and others at risk.
The campaign, which runs from 1 November to 31 January, offers hope and encouragement to the people who receive our cards. It can also help bring about change – the impression their international mail makes on police, prison staff or political authorities can help keep them safe.
Read a very interesting piece by Franco Moretti in New Left Review, July/August 2008. It seems like a synopsis of a much longer, multi-volume work on the theory of the novel, which I plan to read when I have time.
Moretti talks about the theory of the novel by asking three surprising questions: Why are novels in prose? Why are they so often stories of adventures? Why was there a European, but not a Chinese, rise of the novel in the course of the 18th century?
His point about prose is that, while many story-telling traditions employ verse, the prose style of the novel has less symmetry and permanence, more sense of being forward-looking, consequenced-based. It also allows for more narrative complexity, with long sentences and subordinate clauses explaining the full motivations of characters, etc. Moretti also makes the interesting, if seemingly unconnected, point that most novels ever produced are dime-store novels, trashy romances and adventures, but most of the study of novels focuses on the tiny minority of “literary” works. As Moretti says, it is odd that an academic study should focus on an extreme rather than the norm.
That novels are often about adventures is a reflection of the widening of scope and exploration of new worlds that took place along with the rise of the novel. But while it’s geographical widening, it’s socially narrow. It’s the world of the petty nobility of penniless knights, brought forward into the bourgeois age.
Chinese 18th century novels, Moretti says, are different in character from European ones. The protagonists are often groups, not individuals – a household, a set of outlaws – and there is less narrative drama. They are less ‘forward looking’; the action moves more ‘to the side’, i.e. the effects of one action ripple across a huge narrative system, with the characters often trying to contain the change rather than intensify it. He gives an example where a character overhears a big secret, one that could undo the main character in the book and set off a whole chain of events. In a European novel she would have told someone, or threatened to tell someone, or blackmailed the main character. But in the Chinese novel, she decides to keep it to herself.
At the end of the eighteenth century, there was a divergence between Europe and China – China produced very few novels, but those it did produce were seen as art. Europe had a huge explosion in quantity but little increase in quality. This was tied in, Moretti claims, with mass consumption – people had to be constantly re-reading the latest thing, but never re-read anything. They wanted width, not depth.
I need to read the whole book, I suppose, to understand the full meaning of these disparate observations for the theory of the novel. This article just raised some interesting perspectives, and encouraged me to think more about it.
This is not the most interesting book I have read lately, but it is one of the most important. It deals with the topics so often left vague in left-wing literature: the nitty-gritty of how a non-capitalist economy would actually allocate goods and services, balance supply and demand, avoid gluts or shortages, invest in infrastructure, reward work, manage workplaces, etc. Essentially trying to create a non-capitalist economic theory.
I have to admit that it was a struggle to keep reading sometimes. The talk of iterative planning, facilitation boards, nested councils, balanced job complexes, etc., is very nitty and very gritty. But it’s necessary. There are lots of slogans, lots of vague and inspiring essays about how things should be. I even wrote one myself a while back, and won a prize for it. That stuff is important, but we also need to take the next step. Capitalism is a horrifically unjust system: that much is obvious, even to many of its supporters. What makes it so hard to replace is that people don’t believe another system is possible. The fact that “Another world is possible” became a radical slogan is an indication of quite how much we have swallowed the lie that capitalism is the only possible way that human beings could ever hope to organise themselves.
Part of the reason for that is that so few people have set out a detailed description of how an alternative society would work. Contrary to popular belief, Marx never did. His analysis was of capitalism, and his references to a post-capitalist society were as vague as anyone else’s. What became associated with Marxism, socialism and anything else left-wing was the central planning installed by the Bolsheviks when they found themselves in power in Russia after 1917 and perpetuated thereafter in Soviet-influenced countries around the world and, to a lesser extent, by “democratic” socialist parties in capitalist countries. So Labour came to stand for more nationalisation and government control, and the Conservatives for the free market, and similar dichotomies arose in many other countries.
Unfortunately, both models have now failed.
Markets, by their nature, perpetuate injustice: those with accumulated wealth are at a huge advantage in any market interaction, and so achieve a favourable outcome, and so accumulate more wealth. In theory, when a sweatshop worker in Thailand decides to stitch shirts for a huge multinational corporation, they are entering into a free and fair contract. But the huge differential in power ensures that the deal heavily favours the multinational corporation. The company makes a huge profit on the shirts and accumulates yet more wealth; the worker goes nowhere if they’re lucky, downward if they’re not. Unions help to mitigate this effect by organising workers into bigger groups with more collective power, but they can only slow down the inevitable. The recent credit crunch shows more than ever the stupidity of relying on a system of individual greed to provide the best results for society as a whole.
Central planning, on the other hand, leads to the development of a coordinator class (“Party members”) who monopolise the decision-making and gain unjust advantages. Plans are developed centrally, with little input from workers or consumers, and enforced using state power. Party members, just like capitalist elites, need to protect their power and wealth from the rest of society, and because they are the state, they have direct control over the police, army, secret police, etc. It’s not hard to see how a police state would evolve in this scenario. Relying on the experts to do the right thing might sound good in theory, but in practice it’s no different from the medieval reliance on having a good king. It might happen, but if it doesn’t, society goes to hell. You need something else, to safeguard against abuse of power.
This book proposes a new way: participatory planning. I can’t go into the whole thing here – it needs a book. But these are some of the main principles:
Remuneration according to effort and sacrifice. The premise is that it’s only fair to reward people for what they can control. Nobody can control how much wealth they were born with, how much physical or mental ability they were born with, how much each person can produce, etc. What everyone can control is how much effort they make, and how much sacrifice (in terms of time spent at work, in training, etc.) they make. So this is rewarded.
Balanced job complexes. In a “parecon” society, everyone will be expected to take part in political and economic decision-making. Not just once every four years, but all the time, from a local level up to the regional and national level. But this will never work if some people, by working in empowering jobs all the time, become experts in decision-making, while others, by working in mundane jobs, become incapable of participating effectively. So everyone should have a “balanced job complex”. This means that in any workplace, tasks are shared around. You might be the manager on one project, and the note-taker on another. And if you work in a comparatively empowering place, that has to be balanced out by doing some mundane tasks somewhere else (e.g. collecting garbage once a month). Similarly, people who work in a steel mill will be able to balance out their comparatively unpleasant workplace by doing a few hours a week of empowering work.
Individual planning. Instead of relying on markets to set prices, each person makes a plan of how much they want to work and what they want to spend. This is all tallied up, indicative prices are set, and several rounds of planning are done to even up supply and demand.
Nested councils. Decision-making is bottom-up, not top-down. Decisions that affect only local people are made only at a local level. Neighbourhood councils then feed into local councils, regional councils, national councils, etc.
This is only a very brief sketch, and does not do justice to it. Because we are so used to how things are, the initial reaction to many of these ideas, especially when presented so briefly, may be to laugh at them. They may sound naive or unrealistic or impossible. But Michael Albert sets out a compelling vision and goes into a LOT of detail to explain it all. He doesn’t talk at all about how to get from A to B, and that for me is the biggest problem. But I guess that is addressed in other books – his main concern here is to provide an example of how we could organise society differently. There is no rhetoric, no calls to arms. It is very sober, very boring in places, but very necessary. If we don’t actively engage in the dull science of economics, it will be left in the hands of people like Milton Friedman, and the world will end in a fireball of lunacy.
Read a fascinating article in the Fall 2007 edition of the Du Bois Review. In an article “The New Latin Nation”, Alejandro Portes made the very interesing, and ironic, point that whereas in the past, much Mexican immigration to the US was cyclical, in the last few decades the tighter border controls have made it permanent. The controls are failing to stop people from coming in, but are making them less likely to go back. So they settle permanently, have families, move to different parts of the country. The article was looking at the second generation, born in the US. It made the point that whereas previous generations of European immigrants could slowly work their way up the economic ladder through the large industrial workforce, now those opportunities are largely gone. The US economy is an “hourglass” shape, with a top tier of educated high-income earners and a bottom tier of low-wage manual labourers, and a very narrow neck connecting the two, increasingly difficult to squeeze through.
The following table shows how the 17-year-old children of immigrants perceive themselves racially, compated with their parents’ self-identification.
Nationality – Cuban
White: Parent 93.1%, child 41.2%
Black: Parent 1.1%, child 0.8%
Asian: Parent 0.3%, child 0%
Multiracial: Parent 2.5%, child 11.5%
Other: Parent 1.4%, child 4.5%
Hispanic/Latino: Parent 1.1%, child 36.0%
Cuban: Parent 0.5%, child 5.5%
Nationality: Mexican
White: Parent 5.7%, child 1.5%
Black: Parent 0%, child 0%
Asian: Parent 2.1%, child 0%
Multiracial: Parent 21.6%, child 12.0%
Other: Parent 28.5%, child 4.5%
Hispanic/Latino: Parent 15.9%, child 25.5%
Mexican: Parent 26.1%, child 56.2%
Nationality: Nicaraguan
White: Parent 67.7%, child 19.4%
Black: Parent 0.5%, child 0.8%
Asian: Parent 1.6%, child 0%
Multiracial: Parent 22.0%, child 9.7%
Other: Parent 2.2%, child 6.5%
Hispanic/Latino: Parent 5.4%, child 61.8%
Nicaraguan: Parent 0.5%, child 2.7%
Other Latin American
White: Parent 69.5%, child 22.8%
Black: Parent 4.6%, child 1.9%
Asian: Parent 0.8%, child 0%
Multiracial: Parent 17.8%, child 14.7%
Other: Parent 3.1%, child 3.1%
Hispanic/Latino: Parent 2.3%, child 52.9%
National origin: Parent 1.9%, child 4.6%
I found this table absolutely amazing. The differences between parent and child racial self-identification are huge! What strike me the most are the huge numbers of parents who thought they were white, and the fact that their children, who grew up in “one-drop-rule” America, have been completely disabused of that notion. They have taken on the categorisations imposed on them by American racial norms. Their parents predominantly rejected the identity “Latino” or “Hispanic” but the children take it on in big numbers. Portes calls this a “hardening” of Hispanic identity in the second generation. Also interesting is that 56.2% of second-generation Mexicans chose “Mexican” — as their racial identity, remember. This is a reflection of American racism, which marks “Mexicans” out as different just as it does to “blacks”. Identity forms and hardens around this ignorance. The parents might have viewed themselves as white, but the children, growing up in the reality of the USA, could not possibly hold that view. They were marked out from an early age as “Hispanics” or “Latinos” or “Mexicans”.
On a wider level it is an illustration of how fluid racial categories are, how much they are shaped by social forces in particular societies. Yet still, for so many people, race retains that vestige of scientific legitimacy. This is particularly the case in the USA, where — despite all the mixing, or perhaps because of it — racial rules are fixed and inflexible. In theory, Barack Obama could identify himself as “white” with just as much justification as identifying as black, but to an American it would be impossible. Even the category of mixed race or biracial is not widely recognised. The old rule still applies – to be white, you have to be “pure” white. One drop of black blood and you are black. I wonder how long this nonsense will continue.
Worth staying up for. He used the example of a 106-year-old voter to go through a century of US history, touching on key moments like women getting the vote, then world war two, civil rights, Martin Luther King, etc., putting everything in context. Hope his presidency lives up to it. This is not the best bit, but is all I could find right now. I’m going to bed – it’s 6am.
Embedded video from <a href=”http://www.cnn.com/video” mce_href=”http://www.cnn.com/video”>CNN Video</a>
God help him.
I am staying up to watch the US election results. It probably won’t be decided until 4 or 5am UK time, but I wouldn’t miss it. The early results are good. I’m not optimistic that Obama will bring great changes – even if he really wanted to, the system would make it very difficult. I doubt he will seriously address the basic problem of growing economic inequality. But still, it’s important to me to see Americans voting for something good for a change. After 9/11, when I lived there, fear was so dominant in the public discourse. Fear and anger. That’s basically been the McCain campaign’s strategy this year, to tap into the deep, deep pools of fear and anger across the country, particularly among rural and suburban white voters. Of course it has worked with some people, which is why the election is even still vaguely up for grabs. There are many people who believe Obama is a socialist terrorist who is a radical Muslim and also influenced by his radical Christian pastor. The attempts to ramp up the fear have been intense, and for Americans to reject that would be a big step. I would be really happy for them. It’s also amazing that after 220 years of white men, we might finally have someone different in charge. Still, don’t want to jump the gun. Will go back to CNN with my fingers firmly crossed.
I really need to read more. Apparently David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide last month after years battling depression, was the “most brilliant American writer of his generation.” I have not read any of his books – in fact, I hadn’t even heard of him until I saw the mention on the Guardian site and a reprint of a speech he gave recently. I can certainly relate to a lot of his frustrations with daily life and his struggles to remember the bigger picture. I also liked his comments about the writing process in this old interview in Salon. I have added his “Infinite Jest” to my reading list, but apparently it is something like 1700 pages so I will have to set aside quite a bit of time….
The deadliest war since Adolf Hitler marched across Europe is starting again – and you are almost certainly carrying a blood-soaked chunk of the slaughter in your pocket. When we glance at the holocaust in Congo, with 5.4 million dead, the clichés of Africa reporting tumble out: this is a “tribal conflict” in “the Heart of Darkness”. It isn’t. The United Nations investigation found it was a war led by “armies of business” to seize the metals that make our 21st-century society zing and bling. The war in Congo is a war about you.
This article should be compulsory reading for anyone who comes out with some remark about Africans being incapable of running their own affairs. I read a book about Lumumba a few years ago and it saddened me deeply. To read this is even sadder. The Congo is a case study in Western greed ruining a country. It makes me ashamed.
Meanwhile British newspapers are full of gossip and celebrity nonsense. Jonathan Ross, Russell Brand… WHO CARES? The stuff that Hari writes about is really important, but you hardly hear about it. If you ever see anything about Africa, it’s usually about Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. I’m no Mugabe supporter, but why are his crimes more newsworthy than the killing of 5.4 million people in the Congo? Could it be because white people are among the victims?
