tag:theconversation.com,2011:/nz/topics/karl-marx-14822/articlesKarl Marx – The Conversation2023-11-09T18:04:53Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2165682023-11-09T18:04:53Z2023-11-09T18:04:53ZWhen Marx met Confucius: Xi Jinping’s attempt to influence China’s intellectual loyalties has met with a mixed reception at home and abroad<p>A new film series produced in China, <a href="https://www.economist.com/china/2023/11/02/xi-jinping-is-trying-to-fuse-the-ideologies-of-marx-and-confucius">When Marx met Confucius</a>, was viewed more than 8 million times in the first two weeks after it was released online in October. But this is not another blockbuster drama of the sort China has been adept at producing in recent years, but a propaganda film aimed at popularising the latest version of what is known as “<a href="https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/7872">Xi Jinping thought</a>”.</p>
<p>Ever since Xi took power in March 2013, his regime has focused on introducing stricter ideological controls and banishing what it calls “false ideological trends, positions and activities”. The Chinese Communist Party has published regular communiques pushing Xi’s ideological line and When Marx met Confucius is the latest version of this propaganda drive. Its aim is to reconcile the regime’s official Marxist underpinnings with an appeal to a more specifically Chinese cultural heritage.</p>
<p>But 8 million views does not represent great box office in a market as large as China and its reception has been anything but positive with audiences and critics either in China or around the world.</p>
<p>The series primarily <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcO7HSCXR9M">consists of dialogues</a> between Confucius and Marx in question-and-answer sessions. These comprise questions raised by a group of young Chinese students and elaborations on these conversations by official scholars and propagandists. The content, structure and aims of the films are unmistakably geared towards popularising Xi’s ideas, with a particular focus on the youth sector.</p>
<p>The films are distinctive in several ways. They combine some of the tropes and techniques of popular entertainment, including the employment of sophisticated AI and digital technologies, while mixing traditional cultural genres such as Chinese shadow play with modern genres such as rap music. </p>
<p>But perhaps they are most distinctive because of the unlikely idea of conversations between historical figures who lived more than 2,000 years apart: Confucius (551-479BC) and Marx (1818-1883). Comment in the west has <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/marx-meets-confucius-in-xis-confused-cheese-fest-80bkqskfc">tended to focus</a> on what is seen as the rather laughable nature of this device. But there is more at stake than the artistic shortcomings of the production.</p>
<p>The central theme of the series revolves around the notion of “<a href="https://english.news.cn/20230702/073894ef71c0431aabc2976bd07cdd82/c.html">second integration</a>”. This idea was introduced by Xi in July 2021, to mark the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party. It emphasises the integration of the basic principles of Marxism with China’s specific realities and its rich traditional culture. </p>
<p>While Marxism has been the official party ideology since Mao’s era, Confucianism has been more recently invoked to build national cohesion. But this film elevates the significance of Confucius to the level of Marx. It’s a shift that would have been unlikely without the approval of Xi himself.</p>
<p>Some analysts view Xi’s propaganda efforts through the lens of his steady encouragement of a <a href="https://time.com/6287699/xi-jinping-personality-cult/">cult of personality</a> in China. But this perspective overlooks the deeper challenges faced by China’s one-party state.</p>
<h2>Challenges of legitimacy</h2>
<p>The political philosopher <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674238183">Ci Jiwei</a>, professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, has argued that China’s propaganda campaigns and ideological repression can be seen as reactions to the party’s challenge of legitimacy. As Ci observes, the CCP “can have no other publicly avowable source of legitimacy than the one tied to its communist revolutionary past”. </p>
<p>But this legitimacy was significantly weakened after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Since then, the party has depended on public acquiescence to its control in exchange for economic development and improvements in people’s living standards.</p>
<p>But this performance legitimacy, relying heavily as it does on economic success, contains inherent vulnerabilities that could undermine the regime. Chinese society has undergone significant and comprehensive shifts. </p>
<p>These have involved the emergence of different <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1478929915609475j">economic classes</a>, the development of pluralistic <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0920203X18759789?journalCode=cina">intellectual thought</a>, a revival of pluralistic <a href="https://ian-johnson.com/the-souls-of-china/">religious beliefs</a>, and awareness of <a href="https://www.thechinastory.org/yearbooks/yearbook-2014/forum-the-rights-and-wrongs-of-the-law/xu-zhiyong-and-the-new-citizens-movement/">citizen’s rights</a>. Meanwhile, for all its efforts at propaganda, China’s overall <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2023/07/27/chinas-approach-to-foreign-policy-gets-largely-negative-reviews-in-24-country-survey/">international image</a> is increasingly negative. </p>
<p>This prompts fear among the CCP leadership and explains the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/25/china-jails-liu-xiaobo">intensifying crackdown</a> on liberal values and ideological control that was taking place even before Xi took over in 2012. To some extent, the supercharging of this ideological offensive as represented in “Xi Jinping thought” is a consequence of this trend. It has earned him the popular nickname, the “<a href="https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/%E6%80%BB%E5%8A%A0%E9%80%9F%E5%B8%88">chief accelerator</a>”. </p>
<p>But this has led to a vicious spiral in which government by diktat – as exemplified in the zero-COVID policy – has led to a <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/chinas-economic-slowdown-was-inevitable">slowdown</a> in the Chinese economy and soaring rates of <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66506132">youth unemployment</a>. As Ci warns, without embracing democracy and opening up to dissenting views, the party’s legitimacy will continue to weaken due to the deep contradictions and flaws inherent in the CCP’s monopoly of power.</p>
<h2>Lukewarm public response</h2>
<p>These fissures have, if anything, been made more apparent by the project to recuperate Confucianism via When Marx Met Confucius. Outside of <a href="https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_14898451">official endorsements</a>, the film seems to have received few positive comments within China. Significantly, initial responses from two main ideological camps – the Maoists and the Confucianists – have diverged dramatically.</p>
<p>On two of the most popular hardline Maoist and Chinese Marxist websites, <a href="http://m.wyzxwk.com/content.php?classid=13&id=481970">Wuyouzhixiang</a> and <a href="https://m.szhgh.com/Article/opinion/xuezhe/2023-10-14/337946.html">Red Songs Association</a>, commentaries have strongly maintained Mao’s condemnation of Confucius and ridiculed the film’s perceived departure from Marxist principles. These commentaries emphatically reject the idea of recognising Confucianism as the root of the national culture and of equating the importance of Confucius with Marx. </p>
<p>On the two main Confucian websites, the <a href="http://www.kongzixuehui.org/front/xscg/20230605/358.html">Chinese Confucius Academy</a> and <a href="https://www.rujiazg.com/">Confucian Network</a> there has been a conspicuous absence of discussion of the widely circulated film.</p>
<p>Among the Chinese diaspora overseas, two prominent bloggers – <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYoYeB-uz0k">Teacher Li</a> and <a href="https://www.ftvnews.com.tw/news/detail/2023A16W0033">Mr Shen</a> – each found the film both bizarre and cringeworthy in its conception and incoherent in its doctrine.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, China’s propaganda campaign, the <a href="https://theconversation.com/chinas-concerning-new-strategy-on-human-rights-unite-the-world-behind-a-selective-approach-212007">global civilisation initiative</a> is meeting with intense scepticism in the west. So this attempt to promote “Xi Jingping thought” to the Chinese public appears to be a hard sell.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216568/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tao Zhang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A new series attempts to integrate traditional Chinese cultural ideas with the Communist Party’s official Marxist ideology, with mixed results.Tao Zhang, Senior Lecturer, School of Arts & Humanities, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2132472023-10-31T19:18:25Z2023-10-31T19:18:25ZŽižek: his key ideas explained<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/550550/original/file-20230927-27-ib94t0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C3%2C1306%2C968&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons/Blatterhin</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>It might be said that books by Slavoj Žižek don’t conclude, they just end. And indeed, no matter which of his many books you open, you’ll find philosophy, psychoanalysis, pop culture, a smattering of off-key jokes, and commentary on recent events – often in no readily-discernible order. </p>
<p>Žižek, a <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/zizek/">Slovenian philosopher and cultural theorist</a>, is known to many today for his 2019 debate with psychology professor and culture warrior Jordan Peterson. This debate, held in Toronto, Canada, was about the relationship between Marxism, capitalism, and happiness.</p>
<p>Žižek was presented as the Leftist counterpoint to Peterson’s reactionary stylings. While the two disagreed on much, they agreed on certain things, such as their criticism of identity politics. Yet this debate, too, arguably ended rather than came to any conclusions.</p>
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<p>Žižek burst onto the anglophone academic scene over 30 years ago with a sequence of groundbreaking works, starting with the 1989 book, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18912.The_Sublime_Object_of_Ideology?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=zWgZRLwcAJ&rank=1">The Sublime Object of Ideology</a>. Then there were wonderful explorations of Hollywood cinema in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90570.Enjoy_Your_Symptom_?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=4Rn9q66vAZ&rank=1">Enjoy your Symptom!</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18911.Looking_Awry?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=sXAKEh5ulc&rank=1">Looking Awry</a>. </p>
<p>Once dubbed a “celebrity philosopher” by <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/11/26/the-fp-top-100-global-thinkers-2/">Foreign Policy</a>, he has since written books on everything from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19322658-violence">violence</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/6636487">the GFC and September 11</a> to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18913.The_Puppet_and_the_Dwarf?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=680CjKYP5a&rank=2">Christianity</a> and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52667524-pandemic-covid-19-shakes-the-world">the pandemic</a>. His latest book <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/freedom-9781350357129/#:%7E:text=The%20concept%20of%20freedom%20is,freedom%20is%20transient%20and%20fragile.">explores the question of freedom</a>.</p>
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<h2>The critique of ideology</h2>
<p>The title of Žižek’s 1989 book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, points towards a key aspect of his profuse intellectual productivity. From the start, Žižek has been interested in what motivates people to act the ways they do. He is especially interested in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/pt/book/show/289666.Mapping_Ideology">why people passionately identify with political ideas and causes</a> that may not serve their own best interests.</p>
<p>An ideology is any political doctrine that promises to tell people how to organise political life, and where they fit into the larger scheme of things. Marxism-Leninism is one such ideology, liberalism another, fascism one more. An ideology can bring people meaning and a shared sense of common purpose.</p>
<p>According to Žižek, political ideologies also rationalise to their subjects why societies don’t seem to always become, over the course of time, wiser, better, more just, and less prone to rolling crises. (Since 2000 alone, we have faced 9-11, the wars on terror and in Iraq, the Global Financial Crisis, the sovereign debt crises, the resurgence of authoritarian strongmen, Covid-19, the Ukraine war and now the Israel-Hamas conflict.)</p>
<p>Political systems cannot flourish unless they can garner the peaceful support of the majority of their citizens. So, faced with problems like war, economic failures, or terrorism, argues Žižek, ideologies externalise these problems’ causes: it’s not us, it’s them, or forces beyond our control, so we cannot be blamed – if only these external or disloyal sources of disorder can be removed, all will be well.</p>
<h2>The political unconscious</h2>
<p>Žižek draws on insights from <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/lacweb/">French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan</a>, to explore the paradoxical sides of ideologies. He couples this with recourse to ideas from <a href="https://iep.utm.edu/germidea/">German idealist philosophers</a> led by Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Friedrich Schelling. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555759/original/file-20231025-19-i775en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting depicting Jacques Lacan." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555759/original/file-20231025-19-i775en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555759/original/file-20231025-19-i775en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555759/original/file-20231025-19-i775en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555759/original/file-20231025-19-i775en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=838&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555759/original/file-20231025-19-i775en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555759/original/file-20231025-19-i775en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555759/original/file-20231025-19-i775en.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1053&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Jacques Lacan.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jacques_Lacan.jpg">Blatterhin/Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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<p>Lacan argued that a good deal of human behaviour is motivated by irrational drives and wishes we do not consciously grasp. This is why one of Žižek’s early books bears the portentous <a href="https://www.unity.org/bible-interpretations/luke-2334-then-jesus-said-father-forgive-them-they-do-not-know-what-theyre">Biblical</a> title, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/90568.For_They_Know_Not_What_They_Do?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_30">For They Know Not What They Do</a>.</p>
<p>In order to understand these “unconscious” motives, <a href="https://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/2688/language-self">Lacan drew on the linguistics and anthropology of his time</a>, producing writings of almost legendary difficulty. One reason for Žižek’s success is his great ability to help Lacan make sense to us today by using examples from pop culture, jokes, and politics. </p>
<p>For instance, Žižek illustrates the Lacanian idea of <a href="http://clarkbuckner.com/clarkbuckner/56">the unsymbolisable Real</a>, by comparing it to <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18919.How_to_Read_Lacan">the monsters of the Alien movies</a>. </p>
<p>Žižek’s basic Lacanian claim, in terms of his “critique of ideology”, is that people do not always identify with political causes on rational bases. They form passionate, sometimes unconditional identifications with causes and leaders based on their earliest attachments to parental figures. They are thus identifying with what Žižek calls the “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18912.The_Sublime_Object_of_Ideology">sublime objects</a>” of ideologies: whether it is a “charismatic” leader, or an elevating idea like “the revolution” or “human freedom”.</p>
<p>This identification does not turn upon any individual necessarily knowing what the cause means, truly, or what their “beloved leader” actually stands for. It is enough for us each to see that others around us identify with the ideological cause, and assign especial significance to it. We then “believe through the Other”, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23961515">as Žižek characteristically says</a>.</p>
<p>Parishioners in medieval churches, he writes, would mostly have not understood the mass, which was carried out in Latin. But it did not matter. The ritual still acted as a salve. People “believed through their priests”, who they supposed knew the meaning of the words being recited.</p>
<p>In exchange for our identification with ideologies, Žižek claims, we gain a sense of “ideological enjoyment”: that we are “all in this together”, sharing everything from public events and festivals to the micro-customs organising everyday life, including shared cultural senses of humour.</p>
<p>On the flipside, Žižek’s analyses suggest that what subjects of ideologies most despise in “out-groups” (ie outsiders), is that they seem not to enjoy the same things, in the same way, that “we” do. They smell, speak, eat, worship, even play differently. It is therefore a very common ideological device to position these others as trying to steal our enjoyment from us: taking away our jobs, our taxpayer’s dollars, our “way of life” …</p>
<h2>Whither Žižek?</h2>
<p>Žižek’s early work suggested that the goal of his Lacanian rethinking of ideology was to enable societies to free themselves from “ideological fantasies” – like recurrent ideas of a utopian <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-history-francis-fukuyamas-controversial-idea-explained-193225">“end of history”,</a> or of a “purified”, fascistic <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Volksgemeinschaft">community of the People</a>. The result would be a form of enlightened political democracy.</p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-end-of-history-francis-fukuyamas-controversial-idea-explained-193225">The End of History: Francis Fukuyama's controversial idea explained</a>
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<p>Since around the turn of the millennium, Žižek has, however, <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Zizek_and_Politics.html?id=_hmrBgAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y">vacillated as to whether</a> any political regime can endure without resting on such irrational political myths. From this time, often seeming to utilise parodic humour, Žižek has positioned himself as a “<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18925.In_Defense_of_Lost_Causes">defender of lost causes</a>”, to echo the title of arguably his most controversial book.</p>
<p>These causes sometimes seemingly include <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/gould/2003/20030721c.htm">even the Jacobin Terror of the French revolution or Stalinism</a>. He has claimed, too, that <a href="https://theconversation.com/heidegger-in-ruins-grappling-with-an-anti-semitic-philosopher-and-his-troubling-rebirth-today-200826">Martin Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism</a> was a “<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/07/12/violent-visions-slavoj-zizek/">right step in the wrong direction</a>”. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/heidegger-in-ruins-grappling-with-an-anti-semitic-philosopher-and-his-troubling-rebirth-today-200826">Heidegger in ruins? Grappling with an anti-semitic philosopher and his troubling rebirth today</a>
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<p>Meanwhile, critics like political theorist <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43221">Ernesto Laclau</a> have questioned the credentials of Žižek’s professed “Marxism”. Some <a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/07/12/violent-visions-slavoj-zizek/">wonder</a> if his patented radical poses are under-girded by any progressive vision of the political good. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/02/capitalisms-court-jester-slavoj-zizek/">Others point out</a> that his own political record in Slovenia in the late 1980s, in which he supported “more privatizations” (“if it works, why not try a dose of it?”), does not <a href="https://www.academia.edu/7180773/Time_to_get_serious">sit easily</a> with his Marxist stances in the West since the mid-1990s.</p>
<p>Žižek was recently described by philosopher <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/02/capitalisms-court-jester-slavoj-zizek/">Gabriel Rockhill</a> as a kind of unlikely “court jester” in today’s hyper market-driven societies: a radical anti-capitalist who is a commercial success, and whose scattered writings are uncannily suited for readers in a rapid-pace world. </p>
<p>Žižek’s evident delight in reversing expectations, and making <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/27/less-than-nothing-slavoj-zizek-review">almost unbelievably provocative propositions</a>, at times makes it difficult to ascertain just how seriously we are meant to take him. Žižek has defended himself against such criticisms by saying he wishes to challenge the “post-political” idea that social change is no longer possible, after the fall of the iron curtain. </p>
<p>Beyond the brilliant exegeses and application of some formidably difficult theory, it is perhaps as an intellectual provocateur that Žižek is most generously to be read.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213247/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Sharpe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Slovenian philosopher is one of the world’s most famous thinkers. But what does he actually stand for?Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy, Australian Catholic UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2051542023-06-08T10:27:04Z2023-06-08T10:27:04ZFive reasons Adam Smith remains Britain’s most important economist, 300 years on<p>June 5 2023 marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Adam Smith, the 18th-century British economist widely hailed as the father of modern economics. </p>
<p>Born in Kirkcaldy, on the east coast of Scotland, Smith studied at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College, Oxford (which he didn’t think highly of), before becoming a professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. He was a quiet, unassuming man, only travelling when he accompanied a student on a tour of Europe in the 1760s. He died in Edinburgh in 1790. </p>
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<img alt="A historical plaque." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=782&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530594/original/file-20230607-25-yfxs0p.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=983&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">A plaque on Kirkcaldy High Street.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Kirkcaldy_High_Street_Adam_Smith_Plaque.png">James Eaton-Lee</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Despite living an uneventful life, Smith is considered a central figure in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-enlightenment-philosophers-would-have-made-of-donald-trump-and-the-state-of-american-democracy-56098">Scottish Enlightenment</a>. His book <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-myth-that-holds-adam-smiths-wealth-of-nations-together-35674">Wealth of Nations</a>, published in 1776, remains one of the most influential books ever written – second only to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital as the <a href="https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2016/05/12/what-are-the-most-cited-publications-in-the-social-sciences-according-to-google-scholar/">most cited work of classical economics of all time</a>. </p>
<p>As my research <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/scottish-enlightenment-and-the-french-revolution/57C02044A2031C54E6D17DFC5F943CAB">shows</a>, Smith is much more than the “father of economics”. He was a <a href="https://www.libertyfund.org/books/essays-on-philosophical-subjects/">philosopher</a>, a <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/495243/pdf">historian</a>, and a <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/in/cultural-history-of-democracy-in-the-age-of-enlightenment-9781350272859/">political theorist</a>. His life work was dedicated to working out the moral, social and political consequences – both good and bad – of the emerging capitalist and industrial economy in late 18th-century Britain. Here are five reasons why he remains Britain’s most important economist. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="A historical portrait painting of a man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=731&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/530593/original/file-20230607-17-nsx4od.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Muir Portrait of Adam Smith, c 1800, artist unknown.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Adam_Smith_The_Muir_portrait.jpg">Scottish National Gallery</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>1. He invented fundamental economic concepts</h2>
<p>Among the concepts Smith came up with – or helped to popularise – are productivity, free markets and the division of labour. His use of “<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-cute-dogs-help-us-understand-adam-smiths-invisible-hand-35673">the invisible hand</a>” to describe the unseen mechanisms that regulate the market economy remains a central metaphor in contemporary economic thinking. </p>
<p>In the 19th century, economists inspired by Smith, including David Ricardo, laid the foundations of economics as the discipline we know today, by formalising economic reasoning in mathematical language. Smith’s innovative discussion of the rules of supply and demand anticipated the economic model of <a href="https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/general-equilibrium-theory.asp">general equilibrium</a>. His theory of economic growth also inspired later economists such as John Maynard Keynes to develop the notion of gross domestic product. </p>
<h2>2. He has a cult following</h2>
<p>Smith was already famous in his lifetime, even before he published Wealth of Nations. As a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow between 1753 and 1763, his reputation attracted students from as far away as Russia. </p>
<p>However, in the 20th century, he became something of a hero for proponents of free markets. An influential thinktank founded in the 1970s, the <a href="https://www.adamsmith.org/">Adam Smith Institute</a> – dedicated to the pursuit of economic liberalism – bears his name. And as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher supposedly <a href="https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2018/07/26/rescuing-adam-smith-from-myth-and-misrepresentation">carried a copy</a> of Wealth of Nations in her handbag. </p>
<p>Smith is widely celebrated –- often by people who haven’t read all his works –- as a prophet of individualism and neoliberalism. People see him as the man who foresaw the rise of industrial capitalism and provided definitive arguments against the idea of government interference. This, however, is a caricature of his writings. </p>
<p>Wealth of Nations was not a celebration of individualism. Smith was all too aware of the dangers and drawbacks of unbridled capitalism. In fact, he argued that governmental intervention was needed to <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/abs/equalizing-hand-why-adam-smith-thought-the-market-should-produce-wealth-without-steep-inequality/5F88C6D86DD80C3420E85982D72FAF50">keep economic inequalities in check</a>. He also advocated breaking up monopolies, providing public works such as roads and bridges, and educating the middle classes. </p>
<h2>3. He was the first Scot ever to appear on an English banknote</h2>
<p>Between 2007 and 2020, Smith featured on <a href="https://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/the-people-on-the-notes-adam-smith">English £20 banknotes</a>. He was a proud Scotsman, a Kirkaldy native who spent his formative years in Glasgow. </p>
<p>Following Scotland’s 1707 union with England, Glasgow was asserting its place as a wealthy city of merchants. The city was benefiting from access to Britain’s growing trade empire, and by the 1740s it had become the centre of a thriving trading network with North America and the Caribbean. </p>
<p>At the University of Glasgow, Smith taught the sons of wealthy sugar and tobacco merchants and slave-labour plantation owners. They dominated local politics, invested their money in shipping and new industrial development, and were rebuilding Glasgow into an imposing city of stone. </p>
<h2>4. He was a polymath</h2>
<p>In his Glasgow classes, Smith lectured on moral philosophy, a broad humanities subject, which in 18th-century Scotland included topics as varied as morals, politics, religion, economics, jurisprudence and history. </p>
<p>He reworked some of these university lectures into a successful book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Published in 1759, this made him a household name throughout Europe. </p>
<p>Today, the book is mostly remembered by <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/theory-of-moral-sentiments-adam-smith-wealth-of-nations-economics-11671662290">historians</a>. But Smith believed his main achievement was teaching young Scots how to live a good, ethical life. Toward the end of his life, he wrote to the principal of the University of Glasgow that his 13 years as a professor of moral philosophy had been “the happiest and most honourable period” of his life.</p>
<h2>5. His legacy is controversial</h2>
<p>Smith’s economic theories have inspired a long line of free-market economists, but they also influenced Marx’s critique of capitalism. Marx admired Smith’s attempts to analyse the new modes of production that were emerging in early industrial Britain, as well as his innovative theory that wealth was related to labour. </p>
<p>Even today, Smith’s legacy is claimed both by neoliberals (who emphasise his defence of free trade) and by leftwingers (who emphasise his views on the pitfalls of capitalist economies). But Smith would have been puzzled by modern attempts to classify him as either of the right or the left. He was merely studying the changing world in which he lived: an early industrial society that was increasingly engaged in <a href="https://academic.oup.com/book/12634">colonialism and global trade</a>. It is time to reclaim Smith’s legacy from economists and to celebrate him as an astute observer of <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/78907/how-the-scots-invented-the-modern-world-by-arthur-herman/">Europe’s emerging modernity</a>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205154/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Plassart does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The Scottish economist dedicated his life’s work to understanding the consequences – moral, social and political – of capitalism. Both neoliberals and leftwingers claim his legacy.Anna Plassart, Senior Lecturer in History, The Open UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2027502023-05-18T20:01:59Z2023-05-18T20:01:59ZFriday essay: what is ‘time activism’ – and why do we desperately need it?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526452/original/file-20230516-24-hvo9ru.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=71%2C0%2C5919%2C3997&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stephanie Montelongo/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When my daughter was in the early years of primary school, her class was asked what their parents’ hobbies were. My daughter piped up promptly with mine: “Reading, sleeping, and drinking wine.” This disclosure of my deficiencies — among the more well-adapted offerings of cycling, gardening, Pilates practice and marathon-running — got me in the soft nervous centre of my self-worth. </p>
<p>Sleeping, reading and drinking wine are three things I have always felt guilty about. They are emblematic of my chronic tendency to procrastinate, my lax self-regulation, my failure to use time productively. Excluding my contribution to the wine industry, they have no dollar value. They produce nothing of immediate, measurable value. They have no rounded sense of task completion at their end. </p>
<p>All of them require a loose and idle relationship with time. Reading US essayist Sheila Liming’s <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/hanging-out">Hanging Out: The radical power of killing time</a>, I realise that, in indulging my dubious pastimes, I am in fact simply “hanging out” with myself. </p>
<p>And “hanging out” — that generous, time-lazy, day-squandering activity that seems to belong only to childhood and adolescence — may well be, Liming says, not only a “survival mechanism” and deeply human need, but an act of refusal, an act with a “radical character”. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Saving Time: Discovering a life beyond the clock – Jenny Odell (The Bodley Head); Hanging Out: The radical power of killing time – Sheila Liming (Black Inc.)</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Reading Liming’s effortlessly intelligent book, I begin to more deeply understand where my guilt comes from. It’s not just coming from my liver. And I’m not sleeping ten hours a day just to refresh myself for more productive work. I don’t <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-reading-help-heal-us-and-process-our-emotions-or-is-that-just-a-story-we-tell-ourselves-197789">read</a> merely to become erudite and informed enough to pen articles like this.</p>
<p>I’m guilty because hanging out — either alone or with friends — has become anxiety-ridden, overthought, over-structured, over-laden. Unfree. <em>All those other things I should be doing.</em> And I can’t dismiss them, because they have colonised my very being.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526488/original/file-20230516-23-5ps8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526488/original/file-20230516-23-5ps8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526488/original/file-20230516-23-5ps8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526488/original/file-20230516-23-5ps8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526488/original/file-20230516-23-5ps8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526488/original/file-20230516-23-5ps8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526488/original/file-20230516-23-5ps8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526488/original/file-20230516-23-5ps8gu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hanging out has become anxiety-ridden.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Annie Spratt/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Liming locates this colonisation — and by extension the guilt of the modern Western world — partly in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-martin-luther-gave-us-the-roots-of-the-protestant-work-ethic-86350">Protestant work ethic</a> and the policing of self that equated idleness with the devil’s work. Idleness — always viewed suspiciously, especially if you were poor — became increasingly a moral sin that required vigilant resistance. </p>
<p>It’s a phenomenon Barbara Ehrenreich also wrote about in her 2010 critique of the US positive-thinking industry, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Barbara-Ehrenreich-Smile-Or-Die-9781783787531/">Smile Or Die: How positive thinking fooled America and the world</a>: a deep Calvinist contempt for the unimproved self that seeped into the bones and flesh of America, holding the individual responsible for their misfortunes in the face of brutal systemic and structural inequity. </p>
<p>This “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” culture (a phrase which, as Jenny Odell points out in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/saving-time-9781847926852">Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock</a>, is in itself oxymoronic) has metastasised into a full-body brutality driven relentlessly at the self: multi-directional, time insistent, waste-not want-not. </p>
<p>The strapping and tethering of time to the ends of free-market productivity rules out the conditions required for stretching and growing. We’ve known this, of course, since Marx’s Das Kapital (<a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/capital-volume-one-9780394726571">Capital</a>) of 1867 – and we know it in our bodies on a daily basis, when we shed time like skin, until we are red and raw at the end of the day.</p>
<p>Here is where fun – where “hanging out” – becomes a powerful act of resistance. Fun is suspect because it hovers and refuses to land; it nets nothing and feeds the moment, not the bottom line. </p>
<p>“Fun threatens to infect and pervert the sanctity of labour,” writes Liming, “and also the power of those who would have us do more of it, for free, by cramming more into the slim, pre-existing spaces of paychecks and contracts.” </p>
<p>Lassitude and playfulness, she writes, are necessary precursors to invention, imagination, connective social thought and behaviour. Sometimes a revelatory idea needs to come out of nowhere and not out of the focused training of the mind on a problem. </p>
<p>Commodified fun, of course, makes a profit for someone somewhere, and relies on the often poorly paid labour of someone somewhere. But fun that exists outside this space — whether it’s two bodies coming together, or 20, or a hundred; in a park or on a beach or in someone’s pebble-mix back garden — can be a powerful, soul-replenishing “No” to the warped logic of the world. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/barbara-ehrenreich-never-stopped-trying-to-change-the-world-189953">Barbara Ehrenreich never stopped trying to change the world</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Childhood time and jamming</h2>
<p>Was the actual texture of life, of human interaction, different in childhood: when time swam and wandered and then ebbed with the sun and the call to dinner?</p>
<p>Who is to say that the time I experience now — task-driven, minute-counting — is conceptually truer than that experienced by children? “When is it Christmas again?” I remember asking my mother. She shook her head sadly: “Not for many months. Not till well after your birthday.” </p>
<p>How was it possible to wait through so much time? I imagined it like mud or treacle — a stretch of sticky, recalcitrant experience to be trudged through. I came to the compelling conclusion there must be a trick adults didn’t tell you about. That you just woke up one day to find you were old.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526478/original/file-20230516-19-s3vsmi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526478/original/file-20230516-19-s3vsmi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526478/original/file-20230516-19-s3vsmi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526478/original/file-20230516-19-s3vsmi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526478/original/file-20230516-19-s3vsmi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526478/original/file-20230516-19-s3vsmi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526478/original/file-20230516-19-s3vsmi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526478/original/file-20230516-19-s3vsmi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Childhood time feels different. ‘I imagined it like mud or treacle.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Michael Morse/Pexels</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Songs come to mind. Pink Floyd, describing how you catch up with the Sun, only to find it coming up behind you again. Ageing you every time.</p>
<p>Plays and literature come to mind: the purposeless waiting of <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-samuel-becketts-waiting-for-godot-a-tragicomedy-for-our-times-157962">Waiting for Godot</a>, the real-time deterioration of <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-picture-of-dorian-grey-review-eryn-jean-norvill-stuns-in-all-26-roles-150165">Dorian Gray</a>’s portrait, the backwards trajectory of <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Curious-Case-of-Benjamin-Button/F-Scott-Fitzgerald/9781416556053">Benjamin Button</a>. Time ticks ineluctably down. Or is a thing we must fill – a container, with deeds and experiences and successes – while we can? Or a thing to be escaped: the oldest bogeyman in the book.</p>
<p>Hanging out allows us to reconceptualise time. For me, Liming’s most potent example of differently experienced time was her chapter on jamming as a form of hanging out. </p>
<p>A group of musicians comes together and, with trust and space, their creativities converge into a time-swelling conversation. It is a conversation that is ephemeral, tenuous, delicate sometimes, robust sometimes. And it comes from a place of attuned listening and connecting. </p>
<p>To improvise with other musicians involves the courage to magnanimously court error. It doesn’t capture time so much as fully inhabit it, in a dialogue in many parts and many voices. And because of its ephemerality, it eludes commodification. If the “record” button is never hit, it exists in uncommodifiable space and time.</p>
<p>Reading Liming on jamming and improvisation, I was reminded of the title story of E. Annie Proulx’s 1995 <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/28003">Heartsongs</a>. In this story, we meet Snipe, a no-hoper conman, out for the next exploitable opportunity when he stumbles on the hokey mountaintop Twilight family. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526495/original/file-20230516-15-s7yp8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526495/original/file-20230516-15-s7yp8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526495/original/file-20230516-15-s7yp8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526495/original/file-20230516-15-s7yp8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526495/original/file-20230516-15-s7yp8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526495/original/file-20230516-15-s7yp8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526495/original/file-20230516-15-s7yp8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526495/original/file-20230516-15-s7yp8i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Musicians improvising together don’t capture time so much as ‘fully inhabit it’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Edward Eyer/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He can’t quite work out the relationships between the family members, but at the end of a meal he is invited to, he is welcomed into their family musical circle. Hardly a word is uttered in this strange after-dinner ritual, but when the Twilights pick up their instruments and begin to play, Snipe becomes increasingly excited: propelled by the rhythms and strands and subtleties they create. </p>
<p>He sees at once that this is something beautiful and exquisite, precious and rare. Invaluable. But when he proposes to the Twilight family that he manage them, tour them — that there are unimaginable profits to be made — they are not only indifferent, but reject his proposition out of hand. Snipe slinks away, after various fruitless efforts to convince: he has no frame of reference for their refusal.</p>
<p>I kept coming back to Heartsongs while reading Hanging Out — in fact, it’s the only story I recall in Proulx’s collection. It is a lesson in humility, I think: stubborn, ethical humility that remains impervious to the marketing imperatives of the world. Improvisation, it tells us, can be a way of living. Time does not have to be turned into dollars. </p>
<h2>‘Politically subversive’ sleep</h2>
<p>My battle with excessive <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-much-sleep-do-we-need-29759">sleep</a>, and the “waste of time” it represents has endured throughout my whole adult life. I have tried to curtail my sleeping, tried to sleep like others do (less), tried to stay awake in front of a computer screen when my eyes are rolling back in my head. </p>
<p>I have felt incessantly guilty about my need for sleep, and frightened when I read articles that tell me <a href="https://theconversation.com/research-check-can-sleeping-too-much-lead-to-an-early-death-101323">too much sleep</a> will shorten my life. I have slept under desks in classrooms, on office floors, on couches in libraries and seats in parks. I have slept at a live music venue while the band played. </p>
<p>And I have slept at parties. Many, many parties. In my twenties, I threw large dinner parties where I’d spend the whole day cooking and preparing, and then, at 9pm, when the food was eaten, I’d go off to my bedroom and sleep. Having babies gave me the perfect excuse; I’d take them off to bed, breastfeed them, and never resurface.</p>
<p>There must be others like me, I thought. I briefly entertained the notion of instigating a Sleep Club in Melbourne’s CBD, a place where people like me could go to safely sleep in between other activities. But how to ensure Sleep Club didn’t turn into Sex Club? How to pay for sheets and blankets and mattresses (and CBD rent)? And how to make Sleep Club profitable? Here was the very crux of the problem: how could I charge people to sleep? And wouldn’t that contradict the whole purpose of my idea? </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526477/original/file-20230516-17-krq0ox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526477/original/file-20230516-17-krq0ox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526477/original/file-20230516-17-krq0ox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526477/original/file-20230516-17-krq0ox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526477/original/file-20230516-17-krq0ox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526477/original/file-20230516-17-krq0ox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526477/original/file-20230516-17-krq0ox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526477/original/file-20230516-17-krq0ox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">My battle with ‘excessive sleep’ and the ‘waste of time’ it represents has lasted my adult life.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gregory Pappas/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>In Saving Time, Jenny Odell tells us of activist and poet Tricia Hersey’s organisation <a href="https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/">Nap Ministry</a>, established to address “the sleep deprivation of enslaved peoples and their status as commodifed bodies”. Nap Ministry encourages collective napping experiences, as well as performances and workshops geared to the reinstituting of sleep as a human right. </p>
<p>Hersey claims sleep as a politically subversive action (which helps me legitimise my own sleeping habits). But in Hanging Out, Sheila Liming writes of sleeping in a way that reveals to me what perhaps I was seeking in my own soporific social withdrawals. </p>
<p>Sleeping at parties, she writes, provides the “serenity of effortless inclusion”. It is safety made even safer by the murmur of social pleasure: a kind of umbrella or arc of exuberant warmth. This same hum of warmth and sociality and protection soothed me as a child when my parents’ dinner parties extended late into the night. </p>
<p>In this way, the pleasure of “hanging out” can be experienced vicariously. Liming cites <a href="https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/audre-lorde">Audre Lorde</a>’s poem <a href="https://hellopoetry.com/poem/18770/the-electric-slide-boogie/">The Electric Slide Boogie</a>, in which a dying woman listens to a party in full swing on the other side of her wall. There is no “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” in her musings, but a soft, gentle and ultimately generous lament: “How hard it is to sleep/in the middle of life.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/wellness-is-not-womens-friend-its-a-distraction-from-what-really-ails-us-177446">Wellness is not women's friend. It’s a distraction from what really ails us</a>
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</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Time and the extraction of labour</h2>
<p>When did the productive use of time begin to be a measurement of human worth?
Before the advent of modern clock-time, Jenny Odell tells us, the “tools of coordination” — in Western Christendom at least — were bells, enforcing the “temporal discipline” of Benedictine and Cistercian monks. </p>
<p>How gentle and undemanding bells seem to us in the 21st century; a languorous form of time-marking, which called us to prayer and food and sleep. Last year I was fortunate enough to spend a week in the tiny town of Sivignon in southern France: there I forgot about my watch all together, guided by half-hour chimes that didn’t even interrupt my sleep, though they continued unabated throughout the night.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526476/original/file-20230516-15-5m2g55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526476/original/file-20230516-15-5m2g55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526476/original/file-20230516-15-5m2g55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526476/original/file-20230516-15-5m2g55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526476/original/file-20230516-15-5m2g55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=924&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526476/original/file-20230516-15-5m2g55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526476/original/file-20230516-15-5m2g55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526476/original/file-20230516-15-5m2g55.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1162&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>In Saving Time, Odell locates the invention of fungible time — time that can be broken down into smaller and smaller measurable, productive increments — in the spreadsheets of Southern plantation owners. </p>
<p>Modern time, she suggests, came about as a product of slavery and its reduction of human worth to the extraction of labour. Reading this, it’s hard not to conclude humans are the inherent exploiters of other humans by any technology available or inventable – including the shared technology of time. Some of us have possessed time, and, in the process, dispossessed others of it.</p>
<p>Centuries years later, we live in a world where time is even more minutely monitored. Workers might not clock in and out on the job anymore (old-fashioned punch cards at least marked a beginning and an end to a day’s work), but their time is as <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-question-of-trust-should-bosses-be-able-to-spy-on-workers-even-when-they-work-from-home-140623">effectively surveilled</a> by keystroke monitoring, key performance indicators, and continuous improvement cycles – winnowing lives into smaller and smaller particles of data. Work bleeds into leisure and leisure bleeds into work; clear boundaries no longer exist. </p>
<p>Leisure itself has become merely another opportunity for self-optimisation (the above-mentioned marathons and Pilates). Slowness — initially a refutation of the obsessive equating of busyness with moral good — has been turned into its own form of consumption, and a form of consumption quarantined for the well-off. Slow-cooking, slow-living, “self-care” can’t be indulged by those frantically trying to make ends meet with a series of casual jobs in a gig economy. Time, writes Odell, has become “the punitive dimension”.</p>
<p>The “science of time”, most notably formalised in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/958259.The_Principles_of_Scientific_Management">The Principles of Scientific Management</a>, has given us a linear, task-oriented way of making sense of ourselves. Drawing on the work of German philosopher Josef Pieper, Odell argues leisure should be “vertical” not “horizontal”: “[T]rue leisure requires the kind of emptiness in which you remember the fact of your own aliveness.”</p>
<p>Many of us experienced this emptiness during Covid; we became “estranged from common forms of marking time” and thus more alive to time’s natural rhythms. We took long walks and noticed new buds on trees, watched fledgling falcons rouse from nests on the roofs of skyscrapers, heard the birdsong that had always existed behind the incessant industry and traffic of daily life. </p>
<p>In retrospect, COVID lockdown might seem merely a period of hiatus, from which the world has decisively returned. But there is political potential in the experience and the way it released us – briefly anyway – from our normal temporal subjugations. </p>
<p>Odell cites 19th-century labour leader Ira Steward to make further sense of this experience. He described the experience of leisure as a “blank — a negative — a piece of white paper”, not something to be filled or pre-inscribed. Steward’s “blank”, writes Odell, “was less like foam padding keeping a hierarchy in place than like a gas whose every increase carried the potential of more cracks in the system.” </p>
<p>In a world of temporal urgencies — of corporate and political greed; climate crisis; economic, race and gender inequality — we need these cracks. And we need the gas that creates them.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/as-boundaries-between-work-and-home-vanish-employees-need-a-right-to-disconnect-158897">As boundaries between work and home vanish, employees need a 'right to disconnect'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Women’s time ‘didn’t economically exist’</h2>
<p>Central to any discussion of time is the way women have experienced the economic devaluation of their time. <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-emotional-labour-and-how-do-we-get-it-wrong-185773">Arlie Russell Hochschild</a> wrote in 1989 of the way feminism in effect created a “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/25/books/she-minds-the-child-he-minds-the-dog.html">second shift</a>” for women. </p>
<p>I’ve often thought of this as feminism’s gift to men, releasing them from the unilateral burden of bringing in a wage, but without repositioning them to take up their share of child-rearing and <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-last-nights-fight-affects-the-way-couples-divide-housework-92582">housework</a>: in this brave new world, women simply did both forms of labour, paid and unpaid. </p>
<p>“Where women are concerned,” <a href="https://libcom.org/article/power-women-and-subversion-community-mariarosa-dalla-costa-and-selma-james">wrote</a> Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, proponents of the 1970s Wages for Housework movement, “their labour appears to be a personal service outside of capital.” </p>
<p>Odell tells of the first New Zealand member of parliament Marilyn Wearing, who studied the provisioning for women’s time and unpaid labour in existing economic structures for her 1988 book <a href="https://www.marilynwaring.com/publications/if-women-counted.asp">If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics</a>. She found, quite simply, that women’s time, and women’s work, didn’t economically exist.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526492/original/file-20230516-29-ike089.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="clothes on line" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526492/original/file-20230516-29-ike089.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526492/original/file-20230516-29-ike089.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526492/original/file-20230516-29-ike089.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526492/original/file-20230516-29-ike089.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526492/original/file-20230516-29-ike089.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526492/original/file-20230516-29-ike089.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526492/original/file-20230516-29-ike089.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In this brave new world, women simply did both forms of labour, paid and unpaid: ‘feminism’s gift to men’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Brina Blum/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>And if women’s work time doesn’t exist, what of women’s leisure time? In 1929, in <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-a-room-of-ones-own-virginia-woolfs-feminist-call-to-arms-145398">A Room of One’s Own</a>, Virginia Woolf asked: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>[W]hat alternations of work and rest [might women] need, interpreting rest as not doing nothing but as doing something but something that is different; and what should that difference be? All this should be discussed and discovered.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As with so many of Virginia Woolf’s questions, the answers remain at large.</p>
<p>Were women in the past more wretchedly used by time? Or are the uses just different now: the burdens outsourced, displaced onto others so new burdens might be absorbed? I’ve often wondered, how — when they hardly had hot water and ran their clothes through a mangle after sloshing them in sudsy water with a paddle — women of the past managed so decisively to outdo us when it came to keeping the world clean? </p>
<p>I haven’t run an iron over an article of clothing in years. Boiling things, steaming things, soaking things, making vinegar and bicarb solutions, using lemon juice in remarkable ways to get out stains. Hard-bristled floor brushes on flagged floors, followed by mopping (with boiled water). How did they get all the grit out of the tiles and the baked on charcoal out of ovens? Did they use their time better than us? </p>
<p>In a certain part of Malaysia, Odell tells us, a <em>woman’s</em> measurement of time prevails; to the question “how long does it take to get there?” the answer might be “three-rice-cookings”. I like this remoulding of time in the shape of women’s traditional chores. How long does it take to get there? “Four nappy changes.” “Six loads of washing.” “Thirteen bedtime stories.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-do-women-want-freuds-infamous-question-invites-voyeurism-but-examining-what-they-do-is-far-more-revealing-199202">What do women want? Freud's infamous question invites voyeurism – but examining what they do is far more revealing</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Redefining time</h2>
<p>Odell leads us from our small, narrow, self-flagellating experience of time to its deeper manifestations and inhabitations. She begins with moss: invisibly moving, formidably growing, in a way that is reminiscent of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-sylvia-plaths-profound-nature-poetry-elevates-her-writing-beyond-tragedy-and-despair-200024">Sylvia Plath</a>’s poem <a href="https://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/poetryperformance/plath/poem1/plath1.html">Mushrooms</a>. In the creeping pathway of moss that grows in a cactus planter on her windowsill, Odell observes continuity at work, the feeding of time with more time: “Tomorrow was growing raw out of the husk of today.”</p>
<p>Plants, Odell writes, are “the ongoing materialisation of time itself”. And in rocks and stone and pebbles we bear witness to a geological time that is past, present and future all at once. We cannot suppress time or nature, or the nature–time confluence of events such as landslides. The subjecthood and agency of the non-human, of the apparently inert, teach us something that clocks cannot.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526487/original/file-20230516-19-wfpbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526487/original/file-20230516-19-wfpbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526487/original/file-20230516-19-wfpbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526487/original/file-20230516-19-wfpbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526487/original/file-20230516-19-wfpbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526487/original/file-20230516-19-wfpbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526487/original/file-20230516-19-wfpbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526487/original/file-20230516-19-wfpbe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jenny Odell observes of moss on her windowsill cactus, ‘Tomorrow was growing raw out of the husk of today.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Annie Spratt/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As do Indigenous notions of time. Bill Gammage’s 2012 book <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Bill-Gammage-Biggest-Estate-on-Earth-9781743311325">The Biggest Estate on Earth</a> was revelatory upon publication not because of its carefully organised evidence of Indigenous plant cultivation, but because of the Indigenous conceptualisation of time the book conveyed. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/dates-add-nothing-to-our-culture-everywhen-explores-indigenous-deep-history-challenging-linear-colonial-narratives-199871">Indigenous time</a> was too vast to make fungible: it was understood across huge expanses of land, imagined well beyond the lifetime of the individual, connective of past, present and future. It was a conceptualisation of time so foreign to colonisers, the architects of fungible time, that it was ungraspable, only demeanable. </p>
<p>In measuring time so finely, in cutting it down and down into microscopic forms of accountability, we have demeaned time. We have made it sad and attenuated. We deny it its power and sanctity.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/dates-add-nothing-to-our-culture-everywhen-explores-indigenous-deep-history-challenging-linear-colonial-narratives-199871">'Dates add nothing to our culture': Everywhen explores Indigenous deep history, challenging linear, colonial narratives</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Modern time feels ‘poisonous’</h2>
<p>Strangely, while reading Odell’s and Liming’s books, and thinking about this article, my wristwatch stopped working. It has remained on my arm regardless, stuck at an eternal 11:10, and I keep referring to it out of habit. I wish this were a source of calm for me, that it made me stop and think in ways other than minutes and hours. But it doesn’t. It makes me ill at ease, and reminds me of yet another thing to put on my to-do list (get battery).</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526484/original/file-20230516-15-dmbv3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526484/original/file-20230516-15-dmbv3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/526484/original/file-20230516-15-dmbv3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526484/original/file-20230516-15-dmbv3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526484/original/file-20230516-15-dmbv3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=934&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526484/original/file-20230516-15-dmbv3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526484/original/file-20230516-15-dmbv3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/526484/original/file-20230516-15-dmbv3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Pa</span></span>
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<p>I can’t find the “temporal latitude” to disengage myself from the anxieties of a stopped watch, because I don’t live on a mountain or in a cave. I have a mortgage to pay and children to shepherd properly into adulthood. I don’t have the time to be loose, or big, about time. And this is the crux of so many of our current problems and neuroses. We know it. We know how modern time feels in our bodies — like quicksilver, poisonous, impossible to pin down.</p>
<p>Both Odell and Liming propose “time activism” as part of a larger project to address the urgent issues our world faces. We need a “strategic confiscation of time,” Liming says: we need to kill time good and dead and let it resurface in its own natural, communal rhythms – informed by our needs and not our labour value.</p>
<p>But perhaps we also need to treat it more gently, to tend it with care and understanding. “Would it be possible,” writes Odell, “not to save and spend time, but to garden it – by saving, inventing, and stewarding different rhythms of life?”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202750/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Edwina Preston received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts for her most recent novel Bad Art Mother.</span></em></p>Edwina Preston reflects on the lost art of hanging out – which feeds creativity – and the need to reclaim time from the pressures of productivity. She draws on new books by Jenny Odell and Sheila Liming.Edwina Preston, PhD Candidate, The University of MelbourneLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1995722023-03-03T06:09:49Z2023-03-03T06:09:49ZEconomic growth is fuelling climate change – a new book proposes ‘degrowth communism’ as the solution<p>I’m often told that degrowth, the planned downscaling of production and consumption to reduce the pressure on Earth’s ecosystems, is a tough sell. But a 36-year-old associate professor at Tokyo University has <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/feb/28/a-greener-marx-kohei-saito-on-connecting-communism-with-the-climate-crisis">made a name for himself</a> arguing that “degrowth communism” could halt the escalating climate emergency.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513174/original/file-20230302-16-g0suqd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black book cover with white Japanese writing and an image of the author superimposed on a red Earth." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513174/original/file-20230302-16-g0suqd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/513174/original/file-20230302-16-g0suqd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513174/original/file-20230302-16-g0suqd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513174/original/file-20230302-16-g0suqd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=967&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513174/original/file-20230302-16-g0suqd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1215&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513174/original/file-20230302-16-g0suqd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1215&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/513174/original/file-20230302-16-g0suqd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1215&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The first edition cover of Capital in the Anthropocene, published in 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Anthropocene#/media/File:Capital-in-the-Anthropocene.png">Kohei Saito</a></span>
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<p>Kohei Saito, the bestselling author of Capital in the Anthropocene, is back with a new book: <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/marx-in-the-anthropocene/D58765916F0CB624FCCBB61F50879376">Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism</a>. The book is dense, especially for those not fluent in Marxist jargon who, I suspect, care little about whether or not Karl Marx started worrying about nature in his later years.</p>
<p>And yet, the way Saito mobilises Marxist theory to make a plea for “the abundance of wealth in degrowth communism” (the title of the last chapter of his book) is as precise as it is gripping. This is what attracted my attention as an economist <a href="https://theses.hal.science/tel-02499463/document">working on degrowth</a>: Saito’s attempts to reconcile Marxism with newer ideas around alternatives to economic growth might bring critiques of capitalism to an unprecedented level of popularity.</p>
<h2>Economic growth creates scarcity</h2>
<p>Saito turns the concept of economic growth on its head. Many people assume that growth makes us richer but what if it did the precise opposite? </p>
<p>Gross domestic product (GDP), a monetary measure of production, can rise because someone privatises a common good – what British geographer <a href="https://books.google.se/books/about/Seventeen_Contradictions_and_the_End_of.html?id=EDg_AwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y">David Harvey</a> calls “accumulation by dispossession”. Fence a resource that people could previously access for free and start selling it to them. </p>
<p>This <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919304203">rent extraction</a> might inflate GDP but it doesn’t create anything useful. In fact, by preventing people from accessing the means of subsistence it creates an artificial scarcity.</p>
<p>The more money accumulates, the more these snatch-and-sell tricks become possible, whether it’s for natural resources, knowledge or labour. In a world where everything becomes a potential commodity (in other words, something which can be bought and sold), the ruling rationality favours lucrative activities over others. </p>
<p>Why would you lend your apartment to someone for free if you can rent it on Airbnb? And that’s the catch: once you need money to satisfy your needs, you are forced to play like a capitalist.</p>
<h2>An emergency brake</h2>
<p>This self-perpetuating striving for moneymaking pushes us to turn more and more of nature into a commodity. The money companies can make is infinite while the quantities of nature at disposition are getting scarcer. </p>
<p>There may be no clearer illustration than the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2023/02/07/bp-boasts-record-profits-as-oil-giants-report-historic-windfalls/">record profits</a> of fossil fuel companies amid <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-01/climate-change-is-messing-with-forests-ability-to-soak-up-carbon">worsening climate conditions</a>.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/3989-the-future-is-degrowth">Degrowth</a> could act as an emergency brake on this vicious cycle, Saito argues, by “terminat[ing] the ceaseless exploitation of humanity and the robbery of nature”. </p>
<p>Academics define degrowth as a democratically planned effort to downscale levels of production and consumption in order to lighten environmental pressures. The democratic part is important: the idea is to do this in a way that reduces inequality and improves wellbeing for everyone.</p>
<p>It’s difficult to imagine this happening within capitalism, a system which must continually expand and generate more. And that’s Saito’s point: communism is much more likely to achieve these objectives.</p>
<p>He reasons that an economy concerned with meeting human need is more likely to avoid producing junk. Without the get-rich-or-perish imperative, many nature-intensive goods and services would cease to be necessary or desirable. </p>
<p>Saito calls this “a conscious downscaling of the current ‘realm of necessity’”. This Marxist term describes what we consider our essential needs. Under degrowth communism, this realm would shrink to exclude things and activities which don’t benefit human wellbeing or contribute to sustainability.</p>
<p>Suddenly, it’s possible to organise work differently. Gone is the industrial model of producing something as cheaply as possible while sacrificing safety and the pleasantness inherent in a shared effort. </p>
<p>Instead of competing for market share, companies could cooperate to achieve common goals like restoring biodiversity. Reducing the importance given to moneymaking would free societies to improve all these things we today trivialise because they aren’t profitable.</p>
<p>Such an economy might be slower and smaller money-wise but it would be more sustainable and more effective in delivering wellbeing, which is all we should be asking from an economy anyway.</p>
<h2>Towards a post-scarcity society</h2>
<p>Saito’s book is refreshing because it helps end an old feud between socialists who trust that new technologies and the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/mar/18/fully-automated-luxury-communism-robots-employment">automation of work</a> can deliver an expanding economy with greater leisure time and those who argue for a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10455752.2017.1386695">socialism without growth</a>. </p>
<p>Instead of perpetually growing the economy by making more things private property and saleable, Saito proposes sharing the wealth we’ve already created. This could usher in a new way of living, where people can afford to spend less time and effort producing commodities and turn their attention towards things that really matter to them, what Marxists call the realm of freedom. This should start, Saito argues, with restoring the health of Earth’s ecosystems, on which everything else relies.</p>
<p>No longer forced to obsess over money, people could enjoy the abundance of social and natural wealth <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/3693-post-growth-living">outside of consumerism</a>. Imagine trading the new smartphones which arrive yearly for luxuriant ecosystems, thriving communal spaces and vibrant democracies we finally have time to explore and participate in.</p>
<p>Saito breathes new life into Marxist ideas with his book by presenting evidence of life beyond endless extraction, production and consumption. As the author himself argues, this could not have come at a better time: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Although it was never recognised during the 20th century, Marx’s idea of degrowth communism is more important than ever today because it increases the chance of human survival in the Anthropocene.</p>
</blockquote>
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<img alt="Imagine weekly climate newsletter" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/434988/original/file-20211201-21-13avx6y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p><strong><em>Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?</em></strong>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Timothée Parrique does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>What does Karl Marx have to say about climate change? Quite a lot, according to a new book.Timothée Parrique, Researcher in Ecological Economics, Lund UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1984002023-02-28T19:06:21Z2023-02-28T19:06:21ZThe Dark Side of the Moon at 50: how Marx, trauma and compassion all influenced Pink Floyd’s masterpiece<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/512316/original/file-20230226-2222-ogd47z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=12%2C0%2C4013%2C2263&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Dixi et salvavi animam meam.</em></p>
<p>This Latin phrase – I have spoken and saved my soul – sits at the end of Karl Marx’s <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/">Critique of the Gotha Programme</a>. </p>
<p>Written in 1875, this text imagines a communist society that will come about “after the enslaving of the individual to the division of labour, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labour has vanished”. </p>
<p>Only then, Marx argues, “can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be completely transcended and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”</p>
<p>Roger Waters – bassist, lyricist and conceptual mastermind behind Pink Floyd’s 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon, released 50 years ago today – knows Marx’s Critique. Indeed, he quotes it when discussing the record with music journalist John Harris. </p>
<p>“Making The Dark Side of the Moon, we were all trying to do as much as we possibly could,” Waters <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/301401">told</a> Harris.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was a very communal thing. What’s that old Marxist maxim? ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’ That’s sort of the way the band worked at that point. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Assertions about solidarity, cooperation and shared “unity of purpose” – as Waters says – situate Dark Side in the context of Pink Floyd’s <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/pink-floyd-roger-waters-david-gilmour-feud/">notoriously fractious</a> recording career and helps us understand the album’s enduring appeal.</p>
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<h2>Shine on you crazy diamond</h2>
<p>Pink Floyd formed in London in 1965. Led by the charismatic songwriter, guitarist and lead vocalist Syd Barrett, the group established itself as a leader in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_underground">London underground music scene</a>. They released their debut album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn in 1967.</p>
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_Machine">Soft Machine</a> member Kevin Ayers <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/pink-floyds-the-piper-at-the-gates-of-dawn-9781441185174/">described</a> The Piper at the Gates of Dawn as “something magical, but it was in Syd Barrett”. </p>
<p>Not long after the record’s release, Barrett suffered a catastrophic, LSD-induced breakdown. In response, the band recruited David Gilmour on guitar and recorded a second album, A Saucerful of Secrets, as a five-piece in 1968. Around this time, the increasingly unstable Barrett was unceremoniously ousted by the rest of the band. </p>
<p>After Barrett left, says Ayers, “Pink Floyd became something else totally”. </p>
<p>There are different versions of Pink Floyd. The recordings released after Barrett left the band in 1968 bear little resemblance to the first. </p>
<p>Dark Side sounds nothing like the whimsical Piper. But it is obvious the record is in large part preoccupied with the loss of Barrett.</p>
<p>This preoccupation comes to the fore in the album’s penultimate track. </p>
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<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1OOQP1-wOE&ab_channel=HDPinkFloyd">Brain Damage</a>, written and sung by Waters, references Barrett’s adolescence (“Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs”), alludes to his illness (“And if the dam breaks open many years too soon”), and acknowledges his leaving the group (“And if the band you’re in starts playing different tunes; I’ll see you on the dark side of the Moon”). </p>
<p>Drummer Nick Mason confirms the group didn’t want to lose Barrett.</p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/265734.Inside_Out">autobiography</a>, he writes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He was our songwriter, singer, guitarist, and – although you might not have known from our less than sympathetic treatment of him – he was our friend.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-wall-cemented-pink-floyds-fame-but-destroyed-the-band-127174">'The Wall' cemented Pink Floyd's fame – but destroyed the band</a>
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<h2>If the dam breaks open many years too soon</h2>
<p>What we hear on The Dark Side of the Moon is a band dealing with trauma. </p>
<p>In this sense, Dark Side represents the start of a reckoning with the past – a process that culminated with the band’s next record, 1975’s elegiac <a href="https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/wish-you-were-here-pink-floyd-seminal-ode-to-the-tragic-life-of-syd-barrett/">Wish You Were Here</a>.</p>
<p>Culmination is a useful term when it comes to Dark Side more generally. On this record, all the avant-garde techniques and tendencies the band had toyed with in the post-Barrett period – <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musique_concr%C3%A8te">musique concrète</a>, sonic manipulation, extended improvisation, analogue tape manipulation – come together to spectacular effect. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kcet4aPpQ">Money</a> – with its anti-capitalist lyrics penned by Waters (“Money, it’s a crime; share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie”), odd time signature, and handmade tape-loops mimicking the sounds of cash tills, bags of coins being dropped from great height and bank notes being torn up – is one of the stranger hit singles in pop music history. </p>
<p>Be that as it may, Money and the album from which it is taken, of which <a href="https://www.pinkfloyd.com/tdsotm50/">more than 50 million copies</a> have been sold, continue to resonate with listeners worldwide, five decades on from its initial release.</p>
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<em>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/pink-floyds-1-8m-desk-shows-timeless-appeal-of-analogue-sound-74479">Pink Floyd's $1.8m desk shows timeless appeal of analogue sound</a>
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<h2>The enormous risk of being truly banal</h2>
<p>“I made a conscious effort when I was writing the lyrics for Dark Side of the Moon to take the enormous risk of being truly banal about a lot of it,” Waters told John Harris, “in order that the ideas should be expressed as simply and plainly as possible.”</p>
<p>On this point, <a href="https://www.loudersound.com/news/david-gilmour-says-its-pretty-unlikely-he-and-roger-waters-will-resolve-pink-floyd-feud">if nothing else</a>, David Gilmour agrees. He told Harris:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There was definitely a feeling that the words were going to be very clear and specific. That was a leap forward. Things would mean what they meant. That was a distinct step away from what we had done before.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Mortality, insanity, conflict, affluence, poverty and, in another nod to Marx, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation">alienation</a> are some of the themes presented on the record. The need – and this brings us full circle – for compassion, if not outright solidarity, is another. </p>
<p>This is an album about the importance of understanding, as Waters <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/301401">insists</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the potential that human beings have for recognising each other’s humanity and responding to it, with empathy rather than antipathy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Given the sorry state of the world in 2023, about which Roger Waters has many <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-64580688">contentious</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/feb/07/pink-floyd-lyricist-calls-roger-waters-an-antisemite-and-putin-apologist">problematic</a> things to say, I wager Pink Floyd’s masterwork will continue to resonate with listeners for a while yet.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-stoicism-influenced-music-from-the-french-renaissance-to-pink-floyd-181701">How Stoicism influenced music from the French Renaissance to Pink Floyd</a>
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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198400/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Over 50 years, over 50 million copies have been sold. Pink Floyd’s masterwork will continue to resonate with listeners for a while yet.Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1914222022-12-07T19:05:25Z2022-12-07T19:05:25ZWe live in a time of ‘late capitalism’. But what does that mean? And what’s so late about it?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499138/original/file-20221206-26-tvcejf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=43%2C301%2C5708%2C3526&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A worker shovels charcoal at the at Al-Hattab production facility in the Gaza Strip.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Mohammed Saber/AP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The term “late capitalism” seems to be everywhere as a trending meme – often used as a kind of shorthand to illustrate the absurdities of certain free market economies.</p>
<p>On Twitter, you will find the hashtags #latecapitalism (English), #tardocapitalismo (Italian), #capitalismotardio (Spanish), and #spätkapitalismus (German), among others. Typically, they satirise notions such as the idea of endless growth.</p>
<p>The term also pops up in a wide range of academic articles and books.
There are, for instance, discussions around the populist rise in late capitalism, the increase in financial-related investments in late capitalism, migration conditions in late capitalism, and so on. </p>
<p>But what are the origins of this term? And what, exactly, does it mean?</p>
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<span class="caption">Workers assemble cars at the Dongfeng Honda Automobile Co., Ltd factory in Wuhan, 2020.</span>
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<h2>The origins</h2>
<p>Karl Marx first analysed the last stage of capitalism in his three-volume magnum opus <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35192/capital-by-karl-marx-intro-ernest-mandel-trans-ben-fowkes/9780140445688">Capital: A Critique of Political Economy</a> (published in 1867, 1885, and 1894), particularly in Volume 3.</p>
<p>For Marx, an acceleration in the turnover of capital, concentrating wealth in the hands of the few, would result in a continuous tendency to crises. This, he believed, would ultimately make the system collapse. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/karl-marx-his-philosophy-explained-164068">Karl Marx: his philosophy explained</a>
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<p>However, Marx did not use the term “late capitalism”. It was coined by Werner Sombart, a controversial German historical economist, almost a century ago in his three-volume magnum opus <em>Der Moderne Kapitalismus</em> (published from 1902 through 1927). </p>
<p>Sombart’s main contribution was to define three periods of the capitalist economic system: early or proto capitalism, advanced capitalism and late capitalism. In Sombart’s analysis, late capitalism referred specifically to economic, political and social deprivations associated with the aftermath of the first world war. </p>
<h2>A new epoch</h2>
<p>The term wasn’t taken up widely until Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel’s treatise <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/612-late-capitalism">Late Capitalism</a> was published in English in 1975.</p>
<p>Mandel used the idea to describe the economic expansion after the second world war. This was a time characterised by the emergence of multinational companies, a growth in the global circulation of capital and an increase in corporate profits and the wealth of certain individuals, chiefly in the West.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498424/original/file-20221201-14-ljq03t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498424/original/file-20221201-14-ljq03t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498424/original/file-20221201-14-ljq03t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498424/original/file-20221201-14-ljq03t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498424/original/file-20221201-14-ljq03t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=966&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498424/original/file-20221201-14-ljq03t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1214&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498424/original/file-20221201-14-ljq03t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1214&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498424/original/file-20221201-14-ljq03t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1214&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>As Mandel described it, the period of late capitalism did not represent a change in the essence of capitalism, only a new epoch marked by expansion and acceleration in production and exchange. Thus one of the main features of late capitalism is the increasing amounts of capital investments into non-traditional productive areas, such as the expansion of credit.</p>
<p>This period of exceptional economic growth, argued Mandel, would reach its limit by the mid 1970s. At this time, the world economy was experiencing an <a href="https://history.state.gov/milestones/1969-1976/oil-embargo">oil crisis</a> (<a href="https://energyhistory.yale.edu/units/oil-shocks-1970s">in 1973, and a second wave in 1979</a>). Britain was also experiencing a banking crisis derived from a fall in property prices and an increase in interest rates.</p>
<p>However, since the time of Mandel’s writing such crises have become recurrent. </p>
<p>For instance, the 1980s were known for the different regional financial crises, such as in Latin America, the US and Japan. In 1997, we saw the Asian <a href="https://www.britannica.com/list/5-of-the-worlds-most-devastating-financial-crises">financial crisis</a>. The 2008 US subprime crisis became the <a href="https://www.federalreservehistory.org/essays/great-recession-and-its-aftermath">Great Recession</a>.</p>
<h2>The cultural component</h2>
<p>The term “late capitalism” regained relevance in 1991 when Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1126-postmodernism">Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498425/original/file-20221201-22-r3c086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498425/original/file-20221201-22-r3c086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/498425/original/file-20221201-22-r3c086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498425/original/file-20221201-22-r3c086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498425/original/file-20221201-22-r3c086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498425/original/file-20221201-22-r3c086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498425/original/file-20221201-22-r3c086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/498425/original/file-20221201-22-r3c086.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>Drawing on Mandel’s idea that capitalism has sped up and gone global, Jameson expanded his analysis to the cultural realm. His argument was that late capitalist societies have lost their connection with history and are defined by a fascination with the present. </p>
<p>In Jameson’s account, late capitalism is characterised by a globalised, post-industrial economy, where everything – not just material resources and products but also immaterial dimensions, such as the arts and lifestyle activities – becomes commodified and consumable. </p>
<p>In this capitalist stage, we see innovation for the sake of innovation, a superficial projected image of self via celebrities or “influencers” channelled through social media, and so on.</p>
<p>In this time, whatever societal changes that emerge are quickly transformed into products for exchange. Unlike those who celebrate <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/postmodernism-philosophy">postmodernism</a> as replete with irony and transgression, Jameson considers it to be a non-threatening feature of the capitalist system in contemporary societies.</p>
<p>More recently, Jonathan Crary, in his book <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1570-24-7">Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep</a>, argues our current version of 24/7 capitalism, enabled by intrusive technologies and social media, is eroding basic human needs such as sufficient sleep. It is also eliminating “the useless time of reflection and contemplation”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499156/original/file-20221206-24-mk2iag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Portrait of Elon Musk." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499156/original/file-20221206-24-mk2iag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499156/original/file-20221206-24-mk2iag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499156/original/file-20221206-24-mk2iag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499156/original/file-20221206-24-mk2iag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=402&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499156/original/file-20221206-24-mk2iag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499156/original/file-20221206-24-mk2iag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499156/original/file-20221206-24-mk2iag.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=505&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, now owns Twitter.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Patrick Pleul/AP</span></span>
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<h2>And then what?</h2>
<p>Since its conception, the idea of late capitalism has chiefly referred to the latest stage of capitalist development. This “last stage” condition has been bestowed on almost every period following a moment of economic crisis. </p>
<p>Global economic upheavals such as the 2008 subprime crisis and the financial upheaval caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have led to a simultaneous expansion and concentration of wealth. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499135/original/file-20221206-15-hr2hfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Men carrying bricks." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499135/original/file-20221206-15-hr2hfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499135/original/file-20221206-15-hr2hfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499135/original/file-20221206-15-hr2hfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499135/original/file-20221206-15-hr2hfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499135/original/file-20221206-15-hr2hfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499135/original/file-20221206-15-hr2hfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499135/original/file-20221206-15-hr2hfl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Migrant workers at a brick factory outside Kathmandu.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Narendra Shrestha/EPA</span></span>
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<p>In other words, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, such is the ever-turning gyre of capitalism. Indeed, contemporary economists, such as <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/03/pikettys-new-book-explores-how-economic-inequality-is-perpetuated/#:%7E:text=Q%26A-,Thomas%20Piketty,rooted%20in%20ideology%20and%20politics.">Thomas Piketty</a> and <a href="https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/03/nobel-winning-economist-says-inequality-breeds-discontent/">Joseph Stiglitz</a> suggest increasing inequality could endanger our future.</p>
<p>What will come after late capitalism? In the face of the climate crisis, some are imagining everyday lives no longer guided by overconsumption and environmental degradation: a post-capitalist society. In the meantime, the hashtags continue.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/191422/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Elias Aviles Espinoza received funding for his PhD research from the Chilean Agency for Research and Development (ANID)</span></em></p>‘Late capitalism’ is referenced in books, articles and as a trending meme. But what are the origins of the term – and what does it describe?David Aviles Espinoza, PhD candidate in Political Economy, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1943062022-11-11T16:31:17Z2022-11-11T16:31:17ZPermacrisis: what it means and why it’s word of the year for 2022<p>The Collins Dictionary’s word of the year for 2022 is “<a href="https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/permacrisis">permacrisis</a>”. As accolades go, the managing director of Collins Learning, Alex Beecroft, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/nov/01/sums-up-2022-permacrisis-chosen-as-collins-word-of-the-year">has said</a> that this one “sums up quite succinctly how truly awful 2022 has been for so many people”. </p>
<p>The word, most widely understood as a portmanteau of “permanent” and “crisis”, has been in use for a little longer. In April 2021, policy analysts in Europe <a href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/future-eu/opinion/the-age-of-permacrisis/">saw it</a> as defining the era in which we live. Some in Britain inevitably ascribe the genesis of that era to <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/permacrisis-ever-end-covid-pandemic-brexit-ukraine-crisis-latest-fpznr05qk">Brexit</a>. Others point to the <a href="https://www.euractiv.com/section/future-eu/opinion/the-age-of-permacrisis/">pandemic</a>. For others still, it was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/mar/23/theyre-entitled-to-know-the-world-isnt-always-a-safe-place-how-to-talk-to-your-children-about-the-permacrisis">Russia’s invasion of Ukraine</a> that made the word indispensable. As the writer David Shariatmadari <a href="https://blog.collinsdictionary.com/language-lovers/a-year-of-permacrisis/">has put it</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Permacrisis” is a term that perfectly embodies the dizzying sense of lurching from one unprecedented event to another, as we wonder bleakly what new horrors might be around the corner.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1584499364004626432"}"></div></p>
<p>This represents a shift from the way the notion of crisis has been defined until now. However, digging into the philosophical roots of the word reveals that a crisis is not necessarily awful, but may, in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-crisis-and-the-dangers-of-tech-obsessed-long-termism-176951">long term</a>, prove a necessary and beneficial corrective. </p>
<h2>Crisis as necessary to progress</h2>
<p>Philosophers have long defined a crisis as a situation that forces an individual or group to a moment of thoughtful <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Crisis-and-Critique-On-the-Fragile-Foundations-of-Social-Life/Cordero/p/book/9781138393011">critique</a> – to a point where a new path is mapped out in relation to some issue of pressing concern. This definition stems from the ancient Greek term κρίσις or <em>krisis</em>, which describes a medical or political moment of opportunity that bifurcates into life or death, victory or defeat. </p>
<p>However, as philosopher of history Reinhart Koselleck <a href="https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=1598">has shown</a>, in modern philosophy, that ancient Greek notion of crisis undergoes a semantic shift. Its meaning changes radically, to refer to a contradiction between opposing forces that accelerates the transition of past into future. </p>
<p>This can be seen in <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35194/capital-by-karl-marx-intro-ernest-mandel-trans-david-fernbach/9780140445701">Karl Marx</a>’s description of capitalism as a crisis-ridden economic system. In struggling to tame its forces of production, labour and machinery, <a href="https://theconversation.com/karl-marx-ten-things-to-read-if-you-want-to-understand-him-95818">Marx</a> contends, this system causes crises of overproduction: an excess of supply that cannot be met with an equivalent demand. These crises in turn foster opportunities for cultural, social and political innovation, the best 20th-century example of which is the creation of the welfare state. </p>
<p>“Crisis” is similarly defined in American philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s <a href="https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13179781.html">approach</a> to the history of science. <a href="https://theconversation.com/set-in-stone-using-statue-related-metaphors-to-describe-history-misses-the-mark-180372">Kuhn</a> views progress in modern research as driven by crises within existing scientific paradigms. The progressive shift from Newtonian to Einsteinian paradigms in 20th-century physics most neatly illustrates his thinking. </p>
<p>In both cases, “crisis” is linked to the idea – the ideal, even – of progress. Marx believed that, because the rate of profit has a tendency to fall, capitalism would meet a final crisis and that this would lead to the emergence of communism: an entirely new and, crucially, better socio-political situation.</p>
<p>“<a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-climate-crisis-conflicts-meme-ing-our-way-through-the-apocalypse-131572">Permacrisis</a>” represents the contemporary inversion of this conception. It is similar to Marx’s idea that human history will lead to a final crisis, only it precludes any idea of further progress. Instead of leading to something better, it denotes a static and permanently difficult situation. </p>
<h2>A new realism</h2>
<p>This concept of permacrisis has its roots in contemporary systems theory, which claims that a crisis can become so complicated that we can’t predict its outcome. In this regard, in his 2008 book, <a href="http://www.hamptonpress.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Product_Code=978-1-57273-801-0&Category_Code=ST">On Complexity</a>, French philosopher Edgar Morin argues that humanity now resides within a network of interlocking systems and any crisis in one of those systems will engender a crisis in all the others. </p>
<p>Morin uses the word “polycrisis” to describe this situation. It is an idea that is also used in historian Adam Tooze’s work on crisis and disaster. As Tooze <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/adam-tooze-chartbook-substack-newsletter-inflation-crisis/661467/">recently put it</a>, when considering the sheer accumulation of problems the world currently faces – from conflict and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-crisis-migration-cannot-be-the-only-option-for-people-living-on-drowning-islands-117122">climate crisis</a> to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-standard-ways-of-valuing-health-were-set-aside-during-the-pandemic-153222">pandemic</a> and rising inflation – “the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts”. Interconnected microsystems, because of ever-shortening positive feedback loops, can very quickly trigger crisis, even catastrophe, in the wider macrosystem. </p>
<p>Taking this one step further, the shift from “polycrisis” to “permacrisis” implies that we now see our crises as situations that can only be managed, not resolved. Indeed, “permacrisis” suggests that every decision to accelerate a difficult situation in order to come out on the other side of it risks something far worse. </p>
<p>Take the <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk-prime-minister-forced-from-office-amid-economic-turmoil-chaos-in-parliament-and-a-party-in-disarray-192795">recent demise</a>, in the UK, of the Truss administration. The <a href="https://theconversation.com/emergency-budget-announcement-expert-reaction-to-new-uk-chancellors-attempt-to-calm-financial-markets-192669">decision</a> to resolve an economic crisis only heightened a self-defeating <a href="https://theconversation.com/chaos-in-westminster-why-liz-truss-finally-lost-control-of-mps-192921">political crisis</a> – which then very rapidly further <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-uk-is-facing-an-economic-crisis-heres-why-it-needs-to-find-a-global-solution-192823">compounded</a> the original economic crisis.</p>
<p>Permacrisis signals not only a loss of faith in progress, but also a new realism in relation to what people can cope with and achieve. Our crises have become so complex and deep-seated that they can transcend our capacity to understand them. Any decision to tackle them risks only making things worse. We are thus faced with a troubling conclusion. Our crises are no longer a problem. They are a stubborn fact.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/194306/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Neil Turnbull does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Crises are no longer something to fix but situations to manage.Neil Turnbull, Head of Department: English, Linguistics and Philosophy, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1904252022-09-13T05:01:44Z2022-09-13T05:01:44ZThe certainty of ever-growing living standards we grew up with under Queen Elizabeth is at an end<p>Much has been written about how, with the passing of the Queen, we have lost one of our last continuing links to the second world war.</p>
<p>We have, but we have also lost something even more profound – the link she gave us back to when the kind of world we know began.</p>
<p>On Tuesday last week Queen Elizabeth appointed a new prime minister of Britain, Liz Truss, who was born in 1975.</p>
<p>Seven decades earlier, Elizabeth II ascended to the role alongside Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was born in 1874. </p>
<p>That her first and last prime ministers were born a century apart is remarkable enough. But it is particularly significant that the thread of her reign extended all the way back, through Churchill, to the 1870s. That’s when it is possible to argue the expectations we grew up with began.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483913/original/file-20220912-20-ru3jh9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483913/original/file-20220912-20-ru3jh9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/483913/original/file-20220912-20-ru3jh9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483913/original/file-20220912-20-ru3jh9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483913/original/file-20220912-20-ru3jh9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483913/original/file-20220912-20-ru3jh9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483913/original/file-20220912-20-ru3jh9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/483913/original/file-20220912-20-ru3jh9.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1152&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.hachette.com.au/brad-de-long/slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-twentieth-century">Slouching Towards Utopia</a></span>
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<p>As the new UK Prime Minister was sworn in last week, University of California, Berkeley economist Bradford DeLong published his long-awaited <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/brad-de-long/slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-twentieth-century">Slouching Towards Utopia</a>. </p>
<p>It’s an account of what he calls “<a href="https://youtu.be/Nen0pG89fSk">the long 20th century</a>”, a century he says began in 1870.</p>
<p>Why 1870, and not 1901, or even a century earlier at the start of the industrial revolution?</p>
<p>Because, DeLong says, right up until the 1870s living standards hadn’t changed much.</p>
<p>More importantly, living standards hadn’t changed much since the dawn of recorded time.</p>
<h2>Until 1870, we weren’t much better off</h2>
<p>In the millennia leading up to the birth of agriculture, what humans were able to produce barely increased at all.</p>
<p>In the 10,000-odd years between the year minus-8000 and the industrial revolution in 1500, our ability to produce food and other things increased tenfold, still not enough to be noticed over our (short) lifetimes.</p>
<p>Our ability to produce more than doubled again between 1500 and the 1870. But so did population, which kept most people desperately short of calories – and in near continual childbirth in an attempt to produce surviving sons – while necessitating smaller farm sizes that blunted the benefits of mechanisation.</p>
<h2>From the 1870s, life got a lot better – fast</h2>
<p>Then, from the decade of Churchill’s birth, things went spectacularly right. </p>
<p>Delong writes that in 1870 the daily wages of an unskilled male worker in London, the city then at the forefront of economic growth, would buy him and his family about 5,000 calories worth of bread. In 1600 it had been 3,000 calories. </p>
<p>He says today the daily wages of such an unskilled worker would buy 2,400,000 calories worth of bread: nearly 500 times as much.</p>
<p>The population grew, but our ability to produce things grew far faster. It grew to the point where, even in our lifetimes, we could see things getting better.</p>
<p>In the words of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHnJp0oyOxs">Billy Joel</a>, every child had “a pretty good shot to get at least as far as their old man got”. </p>
<h2>Unimaginable change in one lifetime</h2>
<p>From the 1870s on, continual improvements in living standards became a birthright – not for everyone, but for humanity as a whole.</p>
<p>As did the development of once unimaginable products. The motor car, the radio, the television and the computer became ubiquitous during Queen Elizabeth’s life.</p>
<p>With more to go around, it became easier to share rather than take things. Democracies grew to the point where they became natural.</p>
<p>Economically, DeLong credits the development of research labs, modern corporations and cheap ocean transport that “destroyed distance as a cost factor”. </p>
<p>From the 1870s onwards, people were able to get what they wanted from where it was made, and were able to seek better lives by travelling to where they were needed.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Nen0pG89fSk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">University of California, Berkeley Professor Bradford DeLong’s economics lecture on ‘Slouching toward Utopia’.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Most economists didn’t see it coming</h2>
<p>The market economy was necessary for this explosion in living standards, but not sufficient. People had bought and sold things for prices for millennia, but the prices had little to work with.</p>
<p>Almost no one saw such an extraordinary change coming. </p>
<p>The leading economist of the 1870s, John Stuart Mill, wrote it was “questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being”. They had merely “enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment”.</p>
<p>Mill wanted population control. He wanted the expanding “pie” to be split among the people we had, rather than the hordes that would grow to cut each slice back to size.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/gdp-is-like-a-heart-rate-monitor-it-tells-us-about-life-but-not-our-lives-172762">GDP is like a heart rate monitor: it tells us about life, but not our lives</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The fathers of communism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, saw things more clearly.
They expected technology and the taming of nature to produce so much wealth that there would one day be more than enough to go around, making the problem one of how to make sure it went around. </p>
<p>DeLong sees the long 20th century that began in 1870 as an ever-shifting battle between those who wanted the market to determine the distribution of wealth (believing it was the best way to grow the pie), against those who believed such unfairness wasn’t what they signed up for. </p>
<h2>The end of certainty</h2>
<p>How long did that “long 20th century” last? DeLong thinks it ended in 2010, making it a long century of 140 years. Since the global financial crisis, we have been unable to return economic growth to anything like the pace of those 140 glorious years.</p>
<p>Today, DeLong says material wealth remains “criminally” unevenly distributed. And even for those who have enough, it doesn’t seem to make us happy – at least “not in a world where politicians and others prosper mightily from finding new ways to make and keep people unhappy”.</p>
<p>DeLong sees “large system-destabilizing waves of political and cultural anger from masses of citizens, all upset in different ways at the failure of the system of the twentieth century to work for them as they thought that it should”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/beyond-gdp-changing-how-we-measure-progress-is-key-to-tackling-a-world-in-crisis-three-leading-experts-186488">Beyond GDP: changing how we measure progress is key to tackling a world in crisis – three leading experts</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Not only are we not near the end of the Utopian rainbow, Delong says the end of the rainbow is “no longer visible, even if we had previously thought that it was”.</p>
<p>King Charles III inherits a future with no guarantee of ever-increasing living standards, no guarantee human ingenuity will prevail over global warming, and no guarantee democracy will prevail.</p>
<p>It’s almost impossible to predict what the rest of this century has in store. But that’s how it was in the 1870s too – when even the brightest minds of the time couldn’t imagine what was to come.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/190425/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>From the 1870s on, continual improvements in living standards became a birthright – not for everyone, but for humanity as a whole. King Charles III inherits a different future.Peter Martin, Visiting Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1640682022-07-04T20:00:56Z2022-07-04T20:00:56ZKarl Marx: his philosophy explained<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467396/original/file-20220607-18-6fmszz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>In 1845, Karl Marx <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm">declared</a>: “philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.</p>
<p>Change it he did. </p>
<p>Political movements representing masses of new industrial workers, many inspired by his thought, reshaped the world in the 19th and 20th centuries through revolution and reform. His work influenced unions, labour parties and social democratic parties, and helped spark revolution via communist parties in Europe and beyond.</p>
<p>Around the world, “Marxist” governments were formed, who claimed to be committed to his principles, and who upheld dogmatic versions of his thought as part of their official doctrine. </p>
<p>Marx’s thought was groundbreaking. It came to stimulate arguments in every major language, in philosophy, history, politics and economics. It even helped to found the discipline of sociology.</p>
<p>Although his influence in the social sciences and humanities is not what it once was, his work continues to help theorists make sense of the complex social structures that shape our lives.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-ideas-of-foucault-99758">Explainer: the ideas of Foucault</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Economics</h2>
<p>Marx was writing when mid-Victorian capitalism was at its Dickensian worst, analysing how the new industrialism was causing radical social upheaval and severe urban poverty. Of his many writings, perhaps the most well known and influential are the rather large Capital Volume 1 (1867) and the very small Communist Manifesto (1848), penned with his collaborator Frederick Engels.</p>
<p>On economics alone, he made important observations that influenced our understanding of the role of boom/bust cycles, the link between market competition and rapid technological advances, and the tendency of markets towards concentration and monopolies.</p>
<p>Marx also made prescient observations regarding what we now call “<a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/351/35192/capital/9780140445688.html">globalisation</a>”. He emphasised “the newly created connections […] of the world market” and the important role of international trade.</p>
<p>At the time, property owners held the vast majority of wealth, and their wealth rapidly accumulated through the creation of factories.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470403/original/file-20220622-51080-ukl5qx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470403/original/file-20220622-51080-ukl5qx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/470403/original/file-20220622-51080-ukl5qx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=819&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470403/original/file-20220622-51080-ukl5qx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=819&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470403/original/file-20220622-51080-ukl5qx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=819&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470403/original/file-20220622-51080-ukl5qx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470403/original/file-20220622-51080-ukl5qx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/470403/original/file-20220622-51080-ukl5qx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1029&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>The labour of the workers – the property-less masses – was bought and sold like any other commodity. The workers toiled for starvation wages, as “appendages of the machine[s]”, in Marx’s famous phrase. By holding them in this position, the owners grew ever richer, siphoning off the value created by this labour. </p>
<p>This would inevitably lead to militant international political organisation in response. </p>
<p>It is from this we get Marx’s <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/">famous call</a> in 1848, the year of Europe-wide revolutions: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>workers of the world unite!</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Society</h2>
<p>To do philosophy properly, Marx thought, we have to form theories that capture the concrete details of real people’s lives – to make theory fully grounded in practice.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467394/original/file-20220607-15946-3pn9ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467394/original/file-20220607-15946-3pn9ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467394/original/file-20220607-15946-3pn9ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467394/original/file-20220607-15946-3pn9ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467394/original/file-20220607-15946-3pn9ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=861&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467394/original/file-20220607-15946-3pn9ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467394/original/file-20220607-15946-3pn9ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467394/original/file-20220607-15946-3pn9ey.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Karl Marx photographed in 1875.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His primary interest wasn’t simply capitalism. It was human existence and our potential. </p>
<p>His enduring philosophical contribution is an insightful, historically grounded perspective on human beings and industrial society.</p>
<p>Marx observed capitalism wasn’t only an economic system by which we produced food, clothing and shelter; it was also bound up with a system of social relations. </p>
<p>Work structured people’s lives and opportunities in different ways depending on their role in the production process: most people were either part of the “owning class” or “working class”. The interests of these classes were fundamentally opposed, which led inevitably to conflict between them.</p>
<p>On the basis of this, Marx predicted the inevitable collapse of capitalism leading to equally inevitable working-class revolutions. However, he seriously underestimated capitalism’s adaptability. In particular, the way that parliamentary democracy and the welfare state could moderate the excesses and instabilities of the economic system.</p>
<h2>Innovation</h2>
<p>Marx argued social change is driven by the tension created within an existing social order through technological and organisational innovations in production.</p>
<p>Technology-driven changes in production make new social forms possible, such that old social forms and classes become outmoded and displaced by new ones. Once, the dominant class were the land owning lords. But the new industrial system produced a new dominant class: the capitalists.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467391/original/file-20220607-24-iagsaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467391/original/file-20220607-24-iagsaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467391/original/file-20220607-24-iagsaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467391/original/file-20220607-24-iagsaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467391/original/file-20220607-24-iagsaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467391/original/file-20220607-24-iagsaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467391/original/file-20220607-24-iagsaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467391/original/file-20220607-24-iagsaz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A poster of Marx at a May Day march in Sydney.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Miller/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Against the philosophical trend to view human beings as simply organic machines, Marx saw us as a creative and productive type of being. Humanity uses these capacities to transform the natural world. However, in doing this we also, throughout history, transform ourselves in the process. This makes human life distinct from that of other animals. </p>
<h2>History</h2>
<p>The conditions under which people live deeply shape the way they see and understand the world. As Marx put it: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>men make their own history [but] they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Marx viewed human history as process of people progressively overcoming impediments to self-understanding and freedom. These impediments can be mental, material and institutional. He believed philosophy could offer ways we might realise our human potential in the world.</p>
<p>Theories, he said, were not just about “interpreting the world”, but “changing it”.</p>
<p>Individuals and groups are situated in social contexts inherited from the past which limit what they can do – but these social contexts afford us certain possibilities. </p>
<p>The present political situation that confronts us and the scope for actions we might take to improve it, is the result of our being situated in our unique place and time in history. </p>
<p>This approach has influenced thinkers across traditions and continents to better understand the complexities of the social and political world, and to think more concretely about prospects for change.</p>
<p>On the basis of his historical approach, Marx argued inequality is not a natural fact; it is socially created. He sought to show how economic systems such as feudalism or capitalism – despite being hugely complex historical developments – were ultimately our own creations.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-nietzsche-nihilism-and-reasons-to-be-cheerful-130378">Explainer: Nietzsche, nihilism and reasons to be cheerful</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Alienation and freedom</h2>
<p>By seeing the economic system and what it produces as objective and independent of humanity, this system comes to dominate us. When systematic exploitation is viewed as a product of the “natural order”, humans are, from a philosophical perspective, “enslaved” by their own creation. </p>
<p>What we have produced comes to be viewed as alien to us. Marx called this process “alienation”.</p>
<p>Despite having intrinsic creative capacities, most of humanity experience themselves as stifled by the conditions in which they work and live. They are alienated a) in the production process (“what” is produced and “how”); b) from others (with whom they constantly compete); and c) from their own creative potential.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467680/original/file-20220608-20-2g1hpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467680/original/file-20220608-20-2g1hpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/467680/original/file-20220608-20-2g1hpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467680/original/file-20220608-20-2g1hpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467680/original/file-20220608-20-2g1hpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467680/original/file-20220608-20-2g1hpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467680/original/file-20220608-20-2g1hpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/467680/original/file-20220608-20-2g1hpu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Workers in an Indonesian clothing factory in 2019.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For Marx, human beings intrinsically strive toward freedom, and we are not really free unless we control our own destiny. </p>
<p>Marx believed a rational social order could realise our human capacities as individuals as well as collectively, overcoming political and economic inequalities. </p>
<p>Writing in a period before workers could even vote (as voting was restricted to landowning males) Marx argued “the full and free development of every individual” – along with meaningful participation in the decisions that shaped their lives – would be realised through the creation of a “classless society [of] the free and equal”.</p>
<h2>Ideology</h2>
<p>Marx’s concept of ideology introduced an innovative way to critique how dominant beliefs and practices – commonly taken to be for the good of all – actually reflect the interests and reinforce the power of the “ruling” class. </p>
<p>For Marx, beliefs in philosophy, culture and economics often function to rationalise unfair advantages and privileges as “natural” when, in fact, the amount of change we see in history shows they are not.</p>
<p>He was not saying this is a conspiracy of the ruling class, where those in the dominant class believe things simply because they reinforce the present power structure. </p>
<p>Rather, it is because people are raised and learn how to think within a given social order. Through this, the views that seem eminently rational rather conveniently tend to uphold the distribution of power and wealth as they are.</p>
<p>Marx had always aspired to be a philosopher, but was unable to pursue it as a profession because his views were judged too radical for a university post in his native Prussia. Instead, he earned his living as a crusading journalist.</p>
<p>By any account, Marx was a giant of modern thought. </p>
<p>His influence was so far reaching that people are often unaware just how much his ideas have shaped their own thinking.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/164068/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Pollard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Marx’s thought was groundbreaking. His primary interest wasn’t simply capitalism. It was human existence and our potential.Christopher Pollard, Tutor in Philosophy and Sociology, Deakin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1731082021-12-06T12:42:52Z2021-12-06T12:42:52ZQuotes from Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth that resonate 60 years later<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435618/original/file-20211203-21-axlnf1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Frantz Fanon</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Franz Fanon, the Martiniquan born psychiatrist, committed Algerian revolutionary and Pan-African thinker, died 60 years ago on December 6, 1961 just after the publication of his last book, The Wretched of the Earth. To mark this 60th anniversary, Nigel C. Gibson has just published his collection, <a href="https://darajapress.com/publication/fanon-today-the-revolt-and-reason-of-the-wretched-of-the-earth">Fanon Today: The Reason and Revolt of the Wretched of the Earth</a>. He discusses some important quotes from Fanon’s global classic</em>.</p>
<p><strong>Space</strong></p>
<p>In the first chapter of <em>The Wretched of the Earth</em>, ‘On Violence,’ Fanon describes colonialism as a system of absolute violence that can only be opposed through violence. He references South Africa as he powerfully describes the colonial world expressed in space:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The colonist’s sector is built to last…a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers…The colonist’s sector is a sated, sluggish sector, its belly is permanently full of good things.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In contrast, the colonised sector,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation…[is] a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled one on top of the other, the shacks squeezed tightly together. The colonised’s sector is a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He then adds an important measure of decolonisation,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>If we examine closely this system of compartments…its ordering and its geographical layout will allow us to mark out the lines on which a decolonised society will be reorganised.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fanon rocked the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/dated-event/all-african-people-conference-held-accra-ghana">All-African Peoples Conference</a> in December 1958 when he raised the issue of violence in contrast to Kwame Nkrumah’s nonviolent “positive action” agreed upon by many delegates. The following year Fanon became ambassador to Ghana and by then the crucial problem for Fanon was the lack of ideological clarity among leaders, regardless of their position on violence and nonviolence.</p>
<p><strong>The rationality of revolt and the philosophy of organisation</strong></p>
<p>The centrality of the “rationality of revolt” to a “new politics” is highlighted by these two quotes, from the end of chapter 2 and the beginning of chapter 3.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The insurrection proves to itself its rationality and demonstrates its maturity every time it uses a specific case to advance the consciousness of the people in spite of those within the movement who sometimes are inclined to think that any nuance constitutes a danger and threatens popular solidarity.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435573/original/file-20211203-21-flosvh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435573/original/file-20211203-21-flosvh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435573/original/file-20211203-21-flosvh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435573/original/file-20211203-21-flosvh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=887&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435573/original/file-20211203-21-flosvh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435573/original/file-20211203-21-flosvh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/435573/original/file-20211203-21-flosvh.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1114&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>If the rationality of revolt becomes the material force of revolution where “violence represents the absolute line of action,” the “new politics is in the hands of…[those] who use their muscles and their brains to lead the struggle for liberation”.</p>
<p>But it is the cowardice and apathy of the “elite” and their “incapacity” to “rationalise popular practice” and “attribute it any reason” that leads to the postcolonial tragedy.</p>
<p>It was not only the leaders who were subject to Fanon’s anger. He was brutally honest in his criticism of the revolutionary militant:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It sometimes happens at meetings that militants use sweeping, dogmatic formulas. The preference for this shortcut, in which spontaneity and over-simple sinking of differences dangerously combine to defeat intellectual elaboration, frequently triumphs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He calls the militant’s logic shocking and inhuman.</p>
<p><strong>The nationalist bourgeoisie and their organisation</strong></p>
<p>Given that he was writing at a moment when more than half of Africa had recently gained independence, his critique of the nationalist middle class and nationalist parties reads like a script which has been repeated over and over:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Privileges multiply and corruption triumphs…Today the vultures are too numerous and too voracious in proportion to the lean spoils of the national wealth. The party, a true instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforces the machine, and ensures that the people are hemmed in and immobilised.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At the same time, wary of the rising xenophobia and chauvinism in newly independent West African nations, Fanon argues that national consciousness is not in fact nationalism. Rather, national consciousness “enriched and deepened into humanism…is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.” For him the building of a nation has to be “accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalising values.”</p>
<p><strong>A new humanism</strong></p>
<p>Those universal values are expressed in the four-page conclusion to <em>The Wretched of he Earth</em>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, comrades, how is it that we do not understand that we have better things to do than follow Europe?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fully cognisant of the fact that neocolonialism can wear a Black or Arab face, Fanon is critical of how newly independent African countries, even when they used the language of socialism, didn’t do much more than follow Europe’s model, looking to take over the colonial apparatus – its states and institutions – for their own interests. Fanon considered this a product of the crisis of thought, the lack of a philosophy of liberation.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That same Europe, where they were never done talking with humanity, never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of humanity. Today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fanon rejects the humanism proclaimed in Europe. Based on colonisation, exploitation, slavery and violence, European humanism dehumanises. And so “We must find something different”. He rejects what is central to European humanism, profit and the reduction of the human to outputs in production.</p>
<p>“If conditions of work are not modified,” he adds, “centuries will be needed to humanise this world which has been forced down to animal level by imperial powers”. He’s saying, humanising the world means rethinking everything, “work[ing]out new concepts… and setting afoot a new humanity”.</p>
<p><strong>Time as the space for human development</strong></p>
<p>Fanon envisioned time akin to Karl Marx’s great phrase, as “space for human development”.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The sense of time must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest, but rather that of the rest of the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Humanising the world means creating a new conception of time, the time to create a new society.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have realised that the masses are equal to the problems which confront them…experience proves that the important thing is not that three hundred people form a plan and decide upon carrying it out, but that the whole people plan and decide even if it takes them twice or three times as long. The fact is that the time taken up by explaining, the time ‘lost’ in treating the worker as a human being, will be caught up in the execution of the plan.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Rather than top-down the plan should come from “the muscles and the brains of the citizens” because “people must know where they are going, and why”. In the early pages of <em>The Wretched of the Earth</em> Fanon speaks of those dehumanised beings who become historical protagonists through the struggle.</p>
<p>This is just the beginning, the work of humanising the world does not end there, in fact by the end of the book it is clear that while this remains a crucial turning point because consciousness, let alone material reality, are not changed overnight. Mental and physical liberation has to be ongoing after the colonists had been kicked out. The “new society”, the liberated “new person” – collectively, socially, and individually – has to be consciously and intentionally developed.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/173108/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nigel Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Fanon was brutally honest in his criticism of militants and Africa’s post-independence elites.Nigel Gibson, Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1692892021-10-13T14:18:07Z2021-10-13T14:18:07ZWhat Grimes can learn from The Communist Manifesto<p>The Canadian singer Grimes has recently <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/grimes-marx-elon-musk-split-b1931773.html">been photographed</a> reading The Communist Manifesto after her split from the world’s richest man, <a href="https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-biography-portrays-a-brutal-character-driven-by-lofty-dreams-41995">Elon Musk</a> – CEO of <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-tesla-selling-insurance-and-what-does-it-mean-for-drivers-130910">Tesla</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/spacex-starship-prototype-exploded-but-its-still-a-giant-leap-towards-mars-152022">SpaceX</a>.</p>
<p>Grimes, otherwise known as, Claire Elise Boucher, was photographed in full fantasy costume on a street corner in Los Angeles while absorbed in the book. She has since <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CUjhhm9rB0M/">taken to Instagram</a> to explain that she is not a communist, more that she got sick of paparazzi following her so used it as an opportunity to troll. Though she did add that “there are some very smart ideas in this book”, so it seems she has read at least some of it.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Communist_Manifesto/YUY9DAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">The Communist Manifesto</a> was composed in late 1847 by German social activists <a href="https://theconversation.com/karl-marx-ten-things-to-read-if-you-want-to-understand-him-95818">Karl Marx</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/everyone-knows-about-karl-marx-but-what-about-friedrich-engels-95241">Friedrich Engels</a>. It analyses and dramatises the divide between rich and poor in industrialising economies <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-the-communist-manifesto/AED6BC948ACF86CEFA68F54se5137F81B5">and argues</a> in favour of a classless, democratic society.</p>
<p>As a <a href="https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/terrell-f-carver">political theorist</a> I have specialised in Marx, Engels and Marxism and have translated this work afresh, so I appreciate what Grimes was referring to as the “smart ideas in this book” – and can imagine how she might be inspired as a reader and artist.</p>
<h2>Capitalism and globalisation</h2>
<p>As Marx and Engels observe, capitalism “concentrates property in a few hands”. They point to “industrial millionaires” who sit atop the “<a href="https://theconversation.com/top-1-of-eu-households-have-carbon-footprints-22-times-larger-than-climate-targets-allow-142357">world market</a>” – those known since the Occupy Wall Street protests as “the 1%”. Musk lives in an otherworldly position of <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-other-1-lives-wealth-gap-not-the-only-way-in-which-global-elite-is-taking-advantage-53400">super-privilege</a>. And as his former partner – and as an artist <a href="https://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/singers/grimes-net-worth/">said to worth US$3 million</a> – Grimes will likely have had a lot personal experience of what was described in The Communist Manifesto. </p>
<p>Musk has used his <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-tech-billionaires-visions-of-human-nature-shape-our-world-144016">multi-billions</a> to fund SpaceX, his project to visit and eventually colonise Mars. And while space travel doesn’t figure in the Manifesto, what Marx and Engels do write a lot about is <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-super-rich-conquered-london-138865">global cities</a>. Places such as New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris and London, that are the playgrounds of the super-rich – even during the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jan/21/wealthy-uk-flyers-opt-for-private-jets-to-evade-covid-and-lockdowns">pandemic by private jet</a>.</p>
<p>“Every country”, Marx and Engels say, now has “a cosmopolitan character”, because products from everywhere are available everywhere -– but only for those who have the money. Maybe when Grimes looked so absorbed in the short book, she was actually recalling all the places she’s been and sights she’s seen, both <a href="https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-grimes-and-the-philosophical-thought-experiment-that-brought-them-together-96439">with Musk</a> and their child and while on tour, in the glamorous world of high-end luxury living. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/billionaire-space-race-the-ultimate-symbol-of-capitalisms-flawed-obsession-with-growth-164511">Billionaire space race: the ultimate symbol of capitalism’s flawed obsession with growth</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A manifesto for artists?</h2>
<p>As an artist, there are also crucial things in the Manifesto for Grimes to think about. Grimes <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/grimes-rolling-stone-digital-cover-960843/">previously revealed</a> that she didn’t take any <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/grimes-defends-elon-musk-billions-rolling-stone-interview-2020-3?r=US&IR=T">financial help</a> from her former boyfriend. But now that she’s un-partnered, she’ll likely be in contact with her agent and her lawyer to discuss what’s next. And Grimes may well find that she has plunged into what Marx and Engels describe as the “icy water of egotistical calculation” as she works out how to keep herself in profit. </p>
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<p>Grimes <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm">may also discover</a> -– and not just from reading the Manifesto -– that under capitalism her cultural production of tunes, lyrics and poetry is her simply acting “as a machine”. Marx and Engels show how capitalism resolves “personal worth into exchange value” –– having “stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured”, artists included. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/elon-musk-grimes-and-the-philosophical-thought-experiment-that-brought-them-together-96439">Elon Musk, Grimes, and the philosophical thought experiment that brought them together</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
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<p>Maybe she might get a settlement from Musk and this will bankroll her songwriting. But if this did happen, others will be after her money – as Marx and Engels warn. And there will be a lot of them: “paid wage labourers” all after a buck. Even if Grimes is living for art and doesn’t need the money, those around her won’t be in the same position.</p>
<h2>Workers of the world unite</h2>
<p>In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels use a clear “before” and “after” structure for their critique of capitalism -– and offer us <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-capitalism-what-comes-next-for-a-start-ethics-44975">a vision</a> of a different kind of society. So what then of the “after” that is Grimes’ future not she’s separated from Musk? </p>
<p>In the Manifesto she will find an optimistic vision. She doesn’t have to be so completely alone (as photographed) because in separating from Musk (and despite her wealth) she’s <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2021/03/03/get-to-the-1-part-quicker-how-much-money-do-people-need-to-join-the-top-1-in-different-countries-infographic/?sh=78151bd62567">technically</a> rejoined <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/who-are-the-99-percent/2011/08/25/gIQAt87jKL_blog.html">the 99%</a>. Indeed, those who are hard done by in capitalism come “from all classes of the population”, just as Marx and Engels predicted. It isn’t only the poorest who get a bad deal -– just surviving the system is stressful enough, as many (maybe including Grimes) are now discovering. </p>
<p>Ultimately, though, the whole idea in the Manifesto is that there should be <a href="https://theconversation.com/is-it-possible-for-everyone-to-live-a-good-life-within-our-planets-limits-91421">more to life</a> than making money, hiding from paparazzi and worrying about parasites – Marx and Engels would have really enjoyed <a href="https://theconversation.com/parasite-at-last-the-oscars-jumps-the-one-inch-subtitles-barrier-131576">that movie</a> about class struggles in South Korea.</p>
<p>Indeed, “freedom” under capitalism is only “free trade, free selling and buying”. Grimes is clearly giving that some thought, and considering what <a href="https://theconversation.com/creativity-is-a-human-quality-that-exists-in-every-single-one-of-us-92053">creativity</a> really means. I look forward to her next (communist-inspired?) album.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/169289/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Terrell Carver does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Grimes finds solace in The Communist Manifesto after her split from Elon Musk, but what can she learn from reading Marx and Engels? A political theorist explains.Terrell Carver, Professor of Political Theory, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1673772021-09-16T14:34:23Z2021-09-16T14:34:23ZCharting the wonderful touchstones on tragedy that go beyond a Western view<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419830/original/file-20210907-17-19ooqtq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tragedy in literature has come a long way since its Greek origins.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Greek_tragedy_mask,_4th_cent._B.C._(PAM_4640,_1-6-2020).jpg">George E. Koronaios/ Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/tragedy-and-postcolonial-literature/8A77BA2BBD8788E36CDD51854D0BBC16">Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature</a> is the latest book from Ghanaian literary critic <a href="https://english.stanford.edu/people/ato-quayson">Ato Quayson</a>. In this Q&A with The Conversation Africa Ghana editor Godfred Akoto Boafo, he shares insights into the book.</em></p>
<h2>How did the book come about?</h2>
<p>It was gestated over a period of over 20 years. It started while I was teaching the paper on Tragedy at the University of Cambridge. I was teaching a course on African Tragedies. </p>
<p>It was 1995, the first year in which I started teaching at Cambridge, and in November of the same year <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/why-nigerian-activist-ken-saro-wiwa-was-executed/a-18837442">Ken Saro-Wiwa and several other activists</a> of the Ogoni people were hanged by the Sani Abacha government in Nigeria. The news came as a great shock to me, and I struggled to relate what was happening in a part of Africa that was close to my heart with what I was teaching about Tragedy in general. It was very hard to relate the theory of tragedy to what was happening in the real world. My dissatisfaction stayed with me. But I took detours to write various other books until I could finally turn back to the question full on. </p>
<p>The result is this <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/tragedy-and-postcolonial-literature/8A77BA2BBD8788E36CDD51854D0BBC16">book</a>.</p>
<h2>What is the point of a critique of tragedy in post-colonial literature?</h2>
<p>Well, tragedy is considered one of the most challenging fields in all of literary history. Tragic theory embraces philosophy, theology, sociology and anthropology, along with various other fields. </p>
<p>Within the Western tradition it is considered the high point of all literary expression and every Western philosopher and thinker has tried their hand at some interpretation of tragedy. </p>
<p>And yet, I noticed when I was reading as widely as possible for my own book that rarely did any of these great thinkers consider the concept of tragedy beyond Euro-America. This is even though throughout the 20th century there have been many illustrious winners of Nobel Prizes from the postcolonial world that have given us extraordinarily rich examples of tragic thought. Among them have been <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1982/marquez/biographical/">Gabriel Garcia Marquez</a>, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1986/soyinka/biographical/">Wole Soyinka</a>, <a href="https://www.tonimorrisonsociety.org/">Toni Morrison</a>, <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2003/coetzee/biographical/">J.M. Coetzee</a> and <a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/v-s-naipaul">V.S. Naipaul</a>. And what of <a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/chinua-achebe">Chinua Achebe</a>, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/154550.Ayi_Kwei_Armah">Ayi Kwei Armah</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/tsitsi-dangarembga-and-writing-about-pain-and-loss-in-zimbabwe-144313">Tsitsi Dangarembga</a>, <a href="https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/michael-ondaatje">Michael Ondaatje</a>, and <a href="https://www.salmanrushdie.com/">Salman Rushdie</a>? </p>
<p>And so part of my task was simply to demonstrate that postcolonial writing also has great and wonderful touchstones by which to theorise the concept of tragedy.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419828/original/file-20210907-26-1yf78wm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419828/original/file-20210907-26-1yf78wm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/419828/original/file-20210907-26-1yf78wm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419828/original/file-20210907-26-1yf78wm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419828/original/file-20210907-26-1yf78wm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419828/original/file-20210907-26-1yf78wm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419828/original/file-20210907-26-1yf78wm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/419828/original/file-20210907-26-1yf78wm.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<h2>What new findings emerge?</h2>
<p>What I try to do in the book is to re-read the entire concept of tragedy through that of suffering and also to stage a dialogue between postcolonial examples and Western ideas and vice versa. I state at the end of my introduction that I do not seek to abrogate Western thought but to ingest it, for to think properly about suffering in our world is to not leave anything out of consideration, no matter its provenance. </p>
<p>But then the question remains: what is suffering? We all think we know what it is and there are many popular conceptions in everyday speech and even in song. For me I define suffering as either the experience or anticipation of events that lead to the undermining of the principles of self-integration. There are many material indices of suffering we can readily point to, such as poverty, losing one’s leg in an accident, spousal infidelity, losing one’s job, losing one’s children to disease, etc. All these lead to suffering. </p>
<p>But my interest is not merely in the material indices but rather in how they allow us to also gauge the degrees to which they affect a person or indeed an entire community’s sense of self-integration. For one of the major consequences of suffering is that it comes with the sense of dissolution, the extreme variant of which is a desire to end one’s life or indeed to exit one’s own community. </p>
<p>If we see suffering in this light we can see that the subject of tragedy pertains most readily to ideas of self-dissolution. Sometimes suffering can be seen in a character’s persistent trait of second-guessing themselves and anguishing over what ethical choice to make. We see this most prominently in J.M. Coetzee’s characters, but especially in the magistrate in <a href="https://www.npr.org/2014/12/12/370344274/the-ethics-of-torture-explored-in-a-painful-fable">Waiting for the Barbarians</a>, who is obsessively revising his own ideas as an aspect of how he processes suffering. </p>
<p>Another great example is to be found in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6149.Beloved">Toni Morrison’s Beloved</a>, where in Sethe’s case her killing of her 2-year-old daughter many years previous to the start of the novel in order to prevent the slave master from taking her children then leads her mind into a turmoil of intense images that arise unbidden and beyond her capacity for conscious control and regulation. Thus, for her, images from the past arrest her present and ebb-and-flow out of her mind in a way that requires her to “keep the past at bay.” And “yet her brain was devious”, as we are also told in the novel. </p>
<p>All these are good examples of suffering and the discombobulation of the self and the psyche that I think are pertinent to a discussion of tragedy. And in these examples we have just seen none of the central characters die. They just live to suffer. </p>
<p>In the book I also turn to the Akan concept of <em>musuo</em> to try and bridge the gap between the individual and the community. For among the Akan <em>musuo</em> points to both transgression and contamination that often require communal propitiation and cleansing. Fundamentally, the tragic character, if they are taken to be truly representative of communal values and not just of themselves, must also be taken in their error of judgement to have somehow also simultaneously usurped those communal values. </p>
<p>This was my way of moving away from the standard Western view of taking tragedy to be essentially the problem of individual choice making and its consequences.</p>
<h2>Ethical choice and suffering – why do these themes matter?</h2>
<p>I draw on my understanding of ethical choice from <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Poetics">Aristotle’s Poetics</a> and the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Nicomachean-Ethics">Nicomachean Ethics</a>, both works that have had a major impact on my thinking on suffering. To put it quite simply, Aristotle argues that to experience the good life – what the ancient Greeks refer to as <em>eudaimonia</em> – one needs virtue as well as access to worldly goods. To Aristotle, virtue is a principle of action. The just man justices and the courageous man is brave. You cannot claim to be virtuous person if you lie in your bed all day and do absolutely nothing. </p>
<p>Secondly, worldly goods for Aristotle do not mean material things, but rather the access to <em>philia</em> – friendly and familial – as well as the comforts of citizenship, etc. In today’s world we might add that worldly goods must include good and affordable healthcare, reasonable and affordable housing, good and free education, the freedom to one’s religion and sexual orientation without the threat of violence, security from random state acts, etc. </p>
<p>For Aristotle, the loss of access to worldly goods not only undermines our capacity to live well, but even more importantly, it impairs our capacity to make ethically informed choices. Thus, for Aristotle if you were to wake up one fine day and your entire family and friends had been killed by a hurricane you would not only be very sad but your capacity to decide on what was good for you would immediately be impaired. </p>
<p>And so, I pay a lot of attention to the conditions that lead to the impairment of the capacity for making ethically informed choices.</p>
<h2>Who should read this book?</h2>
<p>Everyone should read it. The book is pertinent not only to literary scholars, but also to people interested in philosophy, history, and even politics. </p>
<p>Bad political decisions at the national level lead to incredible suffering for individual persons, including the loss of faith in the capacity of state actors to tell the truth and thus to be trustworthy as custodians of the welfare of the people. This may not seem like a candidate for the concept of suffering, but you will be amazed at how much the ordinary citizenry’s sense of material discomfort is further aggravated by the loss of faith in politics and politicians. Furthermore, to understand another person’s suffering is properly speaking a fundamental aspect of fellow-feeling and thus of citizenship.</p>
<p><em><a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/tragedy-and-postcolonial-literature/8A77BA2BBD8788E36CDD51854D0BBC16">Tragedy and Postcolonial Literature</a> is published by Cambridge University Press.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/167377/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ato Quayson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Post-colonial writing has expanded the concept of tragedy beyond Western thought.Ato Quayson, Department Chair, Department of English, Stanford UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1636182021-07-21T12:11:43Z2021-07-21T12:11:43ZWhy a 19th-century Russian anarchist is relevant to the mask and vaccine debate<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/411967/original/file-20210719-21-ckdu1u.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=1%2C0%2C696%2C511&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Beards? Yes. Masks? Perhaps not.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B8%D1%85%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BB_%D0%90%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%87_%D0%91%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%83%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD#/media/File:Basel_1869.png">Wikimedia Commons</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Americans who refused to don masks or get vaccinated during the pandemic don’t have an easy task constructing a valid philosophical defense of their behavior. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108755993">go-to philosophical</a> <a href="https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1257/john-locke">authorities typically cited</a> to defend individual liberty in the U.S. – John Locke and John Stuart Mill – do not provide compelling reasons for ignoring public health messages.</p>
<p>Locke’s <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/">doctrine of natural law</a> states that people are <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-political/">endowed with natural rights</a> to “life, liberty, and estate,” premised on duties to God of self-preservation, and any behavior that risks survival constitutes a <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/locke-moral/">violation of that natural law</a>. As such, there is no justification to refuse a safe and effective vaccine during a deadly pandemic.</p>
<p>Similarly, Mill’s “<a href="https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-harm-principle/">harm principle</a>” – which broadly states that people are allowed to do whatever they want provided they do not directly harm others – doesn’t help those opposed to vaccines and masks. Their actions might <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/10/biden-covid-vaccine-anti-vaxxers-us.html">prolong the pandemic</a>, allowing the virus an opportunity to mutate and <a href="https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/two-thirds-epidemiologists-warn-mutations-could-render-current-covid-vaccines">potentially render vaccines ineffective</a> – behavior that puts everyone at risk.</p>
<p>There is, however, another ethical framework that people refusing to be vaccinated or wear masks might turn to, although it comes from an unlikely source: the 19th-century Russian anarcho-communist <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/bio/">Mikhail Bakunin</a>.</p>
<p>Perhaps most famous for his <a href="https://doi.org/10.3917/amx.041.0112">lengthy and bitter tiff with German philosopher Karl Marx</a>, Bakunin’s philosophy of anarcho-communism consisted of the abolition of government, private property and indeed all means of coercion. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="Portrait of Mikhail Bakunin" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412002/original/file-20210719-19-u2lfpe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Revolutionary anarchist Mikhail Bakunin.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/portrait-of-mikhail-alexandrovich-bakunin-ca-1860-private-news-photo/600027341?adppopup=true">Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As a <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=i2z87R8AAAAJ&hl=en">professor of political theory</a>, I believe Bakunin has been overlooked in the current debate about masks and vaccines. Some of his views are consistent with at least the <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/19/892855760/bioethicist-on-libertarian-views-toward-face-mask-laws">libertarian-based criticisms</a> of mask and vaccine requirements. Indeed, despite meaningful differences, many libertarians in the U.S. share with Bakunin the belief that <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/">freedom is the most important value</a> and governments are by nature coercive. They may distrust Bakunin’s insistence on linking freedom and rationality and certainly would reject his embrace of communism, but libertarians would likely nevertheless admire his skepticism of authority.</p>
<h2>Science as a threat to freedom</h2>
<p>Bakunin might not be an obvious source of support for many in the anti-mask and anti-vaccine camp. His classic 1871 text, “<a href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html#pref">God and State</a>,” begins in a manner sure to offend certain elements of the religious right, who make up a sizable number of <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/03/23/10-facts-about-americans-and-coronavirus-vaccines/ft_21-03-18_vaccinefacts/">those refusing to follow public health advise on vaccines</a>.</p>
<p>Bakunin attacks Christianity as <a href="http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bakunin/godandstate/godandstate_ch1.html">the enemy of rationality and freedom</a>. If humans wish to be free, he argues, they should learn the physical laws of the universe and social laws of society to inform their decision-making. If guided by genuine knowledge, Bakunin says, people can make smart decisions and become rational agents in charge of making choices for themselves.</p>
<p>But science, too, can be a <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statism-anarchy.htm">great threat to freedom</a>, Bakunin suggests – and it is here that many of those opposed to mask and vaccine mandates may warm to his argument.</p>
<p>Beyond the fact that there are limits to scientific knowledge, Bakunin believed that there is always the possibility that <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statism-anarchy.htm#s1">scientists themselves will be invested with coercive authority</a>.</p>
<p>If rationality and knowledge are requisite for freedom, Bakunin argued, then those with knowledge are in a position to force people to do, or not do, certain things.</p>
<p>As such, Bakunin worried that scientists, emboldened by their importance in society, will “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/ch02.htm">arrogantly claim the right to govern life</a>.” </p>
<p>“We must respect the scientists for their merits and achievements, but in order to prevent them from corrupting their own high moral and intellectual standards, they should be granted no special privileges and no rights other than those possessed by everyone – for example, the liberty to express their convictions, thought and knowledge. Neither they nor any other special group should be given power over others. He who is given power will inevitably become an oppressor and exploiter of society,” <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/1873/statism-anarchy.htm#s1">he wrote</a> in 1873.</p>
<h2>Skeptical consumers of knowledge</h2>
<p>Bakunin’s solution to the risk of coercion by scientists was to lessen their authority without diminishing the value of scientific knowledge. To do so, he makes each individual responsible for learning and acting on whatever knowledge they have. The idea is for people to consult scientists for knowledge with the understanding that no one scientist has all the answers and that the accumulated knowledge of all scientists likewise is limited and cannot give perfect answers.</p>
<p>To apply Bakunin’s theory of freedom to pandemic America, no one should be required to get a vaccine. Rather, the population should be encouraged to investigate the efficacy and safety of the vaccines.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Anti-vaccine rally protester holds a sign saying 'Stop Forced Vaccine' above an American flag." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/412183/original/file-20210720-23-1ivoh5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Protesters cast vaccines as an attack on their freedom.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/anti-vaccine-rally-protesters-hold-signs-outside-of-houston-news-photo/1233673090?adppopup=true">Mark Felix/AFP via Getty Images)</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For its part, the scientific community needs to vigilantly scrutinize itself and present knowledge in an honest fashion, eagerly volunteering to the public what it knows and does not know.</p>
<p>Bakunin would be highly critical of both naïve optimists and doom-and-gloom pessimists in the scientific community. People need the unvarnished truth presented in simple and clear terms. If the answer is “we scientists don’t know,” then so be it.</p>
<h2>Ask questions … but be reasonable</h2>
<p>Bakunin’s theory of freedom asks much of the population. It requires individuals to know something of the nature of scientific knowledge, ask sensible questions and then make a rational analysis of the available evidence. It requires scientists to check their egos and desire for quick celebrity and soberly present their knowledge in accessible and honest terms.</p>
<p>And granted, Bakunin did not account for <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/19/facebook-twitter-covid-misinformation-conundrum/">disinformation campaigns</a> of the sort found on the internet that undermine access to reliable scientific data. He did, however, have faith in people to sort through information and make rational decisions. This ability, according to Bakunin, is a precondition for freedom.</p>
<p>Vaccine skeptics, thus, might find comfort in Bakunin. If they ask good questions and do not find satisfactory answers, then his philosophy suggests they should absolutely refuse a vaccine. The same goes for masking: If the scientific community cannot effectively communicate why masks are still needed, then people should not be expected to wear them, Bakunin might argue.</p>
<p>At the same time, those opposing masks and vaccines need to sincerely follow the science and allow themselves to be convinced by data, Bakunin’s philosophy suggests. Refusing to wear a mask based on an uneducated hunch or because of a belief that the “government wants to control me” constitutes folly, not freedom. In short, anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers, to claim their freedom, need to be reasonable.</p>
<p>[<em>Get our best science, health and technology stories.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/science-editors-picks-71/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=science-best">Sign up for The Conversation’s science newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163618/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Locke McLendon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>John Locke and John Stuart Mill don’t provide much in the way of justification for ignoring public health advice in a pandemic. Mikhail Bakunin, however…Michael Locke McLendon, Professor of Political Science, California State University, Los AngelesLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1434932020-11-02T21:49:28Z2020-11-02T21:49:28ZShakespeare’s ‘Timon of Athens,’ penned in plague-time, shows money corrupts but can also heal<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/357783/original/file-20200913-24-1havtx3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C350%2C5649%2C3071&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shakespeare did an excellent job of depicting the real nature of money, Karl Marx believed. A £2 coin issued in 2016 to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In his <em><a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/power.htm">Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844</a></em>,
Karl Marx used Shakespeare’s work to examine money and its impact. The text was <em>Timon of Athens</em>, a <a href="https://doi.org/10.13128/JEMS-2279-7149-18090">tragedy written by Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton</a>. </p>
<p>“Shakespeare,” Marx said, “excellently depicts the real nature of money.” Marx thought <em>Timon of Athens</em> shows perfectly how money both funds the miraculous fulfilment of all our wishes — and also robs us of friendship, love and our very humanity.</p>
<p>As philosopher <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137324580_7">Margherita Pascucci</a> as well as the editors of the <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/timon-of-athens-9781903436974/">Arden Shakespeare third edition of <em>Timon of Athens</em></a> argue, Marx gets a great deal right about money in the play. I think that the play’s case against money is even more sinister than Marx does, but also, that the play shows how money can be used for the public good.</p>
<h2>Spreading the wealth</h2>
<p>Super-rich Timon loves to spread his wealth around. His supposed friends give <em>him</em> gifts in expectation of returns on investment. <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/timon/timon.2.1.html">“If I want gold,” says one senator, “steal but a beggar’s dog / And give it Timon, why, the dog coins gold.”</a></p>
<p>Timon thinks money is simply the thing he and his “friends” use to celebrate their friendship. <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/timon/timon.1.2.html">“O,” Timon tells his greedy guests, “what a precious comfort ‘tis to have so many like brothers commanding one another’s fortunes.”</a></p>
<p>But Marx, like Shakespeare and unlike Timon, finds that money makes us powerful and lovable precisely <a href="http://prometheusbooks.com/books/9780879754464">by alienating us from ourselves</a>. Marx builds his case against money on Timon’s diatribe against gold, which comes pouring out of him when all his “brothers” deny him money when he is most in need. </p>
<p>For Timon, gold is revealed as a “<a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/timon/timon.4.3.html">visible god</a>” with the power to make the ugly beautiful, the evil good and able to conjure what passes for love between people.
Timon comes to understand how money replaces human relations with monetary ones. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1027246635888398341"}"></div></p>
<h2>Written in plague-time</h2>
<p>In <a href="https://www.rsc.org.uk/timon-of-athens/past-productions/simon-godwin-2018-production/the-plot">1605-6, when the play was likely written</a>, Middleton was coming off a string of brilliant satires about money-grubbing and seeking status. Shakespeare had, over the previous few years, written his great tragedies, including <em>Othello</em>, <em>King Lear</em> and <em>Macbeth</em>. In these early years of the reign of King James, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-09770-8_5">the royal court was a hotbed of self-display by courtiers on the make and self-promoting gift-giving</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://archives.history.ac.uk/cmh/epitwig.html">plague had also swept through England in 1603</a>, when about 25 per cent <a href="https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-shakespeare/blogs/sovereign-and-sick-city-1603/">of the population of London died</a>. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/sep/24/shakespeares-great-escape-plague-1606--james-shapiro">Plague struck again in 1606</a>, which is why <a href="https://www.rsc.org.uk/timon-of-athens/about-the-play/dates-and-sources">the play seems never to have been performed in Shakespeare’s lifetime</a>. </p>
<p>The London playhouses were ordered closed. The churches, however, stayed open; congregants could hear about how <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A19678.0001.001">plague came from God as a punishment for their sins</a>.</p>
<h2>Money as disease</h2>
<p>Against this background of courtly profligacy and plague, it should come as no surprise that money in <em>Timon of Athens</em> isn’t merely an instrument of both empowerment and alienation. Money is a disease whose serpent-like winding from person to person swells into a pandemic large enough to annihilate humankind.</p>
<p>When Timon storms out of Athens, he curses the city: </p>
<blockquote>
<p><a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/timon/timon.4.1.html">“Breath, infect breath</a></p>
<p>at their society, as their friendship, may</p>
<p>Be merely poison!”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Alone in the woods, he digs for roots, but finds instead a fortune in gold. He gives gold to the soldier Alcibiades to bankroll an attack on Athens. Alcibiades had been banished from the city by the arrogant, unjust senators. Timon encourages him to slaughter everyone, down to the babies with “dimpled smiles”:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“<a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/timon/timon.4.3.html">Put up thy gold: go on — here’s gold — go on;</a>.</p>
<p>Be as a planetary plague, when Jove</p>
<p>Will o'er some high-viced city hang his poison</p>
<p>In the sick air …”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Sharing money</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360063/original/file-20200925-14-l3ewrc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A man turns away from two women and a solidier." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360063/original/file-20200925-14-l3ewrc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/360063/original/file-20200925-14-l3ewrc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360063/original/file-20200925-14-l3ewrc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360063/original/file-20200925-14-l3ewrc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360063/original/file-20200925-14-l3ewrc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360063/original/file-20200925-14-l3ewrc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/360063/original/file-20200925-14-l3ewrc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Timon, on the left, giving gold to Phrynia and Timandra; scene from ‘Timon of Athens’ (Act 4, Scene 3). Cropped detail from mounted etching and engraving.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">(1299363001/The Trustees of the British Museum)</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We moderns are informed by scientists, but we would do well to think with these Renaissance playwrights about about how the desire for money, and the power and pre-eminence money can buy, has led us to exploit the natural world and create gross global disparities in wealth.</p>
<p>Might money itself might have helpful or healing properties in the face of both the inequities that have become apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic and the planetary <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-change-wont-stop-for-the-coronavirus-pandemic">climate crisis</a>? </p>
<p>The play suggests two ways money can save us. Near the play’s end, Timon’s steward Flavius and his former servants gather to say farewell. Flavius makes the other men take a share of the money he has saved through his employment. <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/timon/timon.4.2.html">“Nay, put out all your hands,” he says, “not one word more.”</a> </p>
<p>What we see is a group of people whose hunger and desire for shelter are addressed by the simple sharing of money — as Marx wrote (<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-each-according-to-ability-to-each-according-to-need-tracing-the-biblical-roots-of-socialisms-enduring-slogan-138365">or at least popularized</a>), <a href="http://doi.org/10.13169/jglobfaul.4.2.0095">to each according to his needs</a>. </p>
<p>Surely today, <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-throne-speech-must-blaze-a-bold-new-path-including-imposing-a-wealth-tax-145747">less hoarding of wealth and fairer systemic distribution of resources</a> could help mitigate some of the worst impacts of the virus on communities that have been hardest hit. Similarly so when we look at the <a href="https://theconversation.com/un-ruling-could-be-a-game-changer-for-climate-refugees-and-climate-action-130532">disproportionate impacts of climate change on the Global South</a>.</p>
<h2>Money upholding law</h2>
<p>The play also shows us how money might help to uphold the law and undo corruption. </p>
<p>With Timon’s gold, Alcibiades is able to bring an army to the gates of Athens. Instead of putting the city to the sword, he uses the threat of the sword to enforce the good laws of Athens and to purge the corruption of the Athenian senators, who <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/timon/timon.5.4.html">“with all licentious measure,” make their “wills / The scope of justice.”</a> Alcibiades honours “the stream / Of regular justice … and public laws.”</p>
<p>We can put aside the spectre of righteous armies at the gates of our cities. Violence cannot create a just world. But money could serve to give the law teeth. Money could fund a lawful path toward a just world. </p>
<p>Imagine how we might scale up from Alcibiades’ honouring of “the stream of regular justice.” Money could fund a transnational movement able to transform into law in every nation a document like the <a href="https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement">Paris climate agreement</a>, a pact which even the <a href="https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2019/11/5/20947289/paris-climate-agreement-2020s-breakdown-trump">signatory governments now can simply nod at and ignore</a>.</p>
<p>Groups championing a <a href="https://ecojustice.ca/">better Earth</a> show us some ways it can be done. To make the Paris agreement into law across all nations would be to turn the world and the “visible god” of money toward what really matters and to give humankind a fighting chance of survival. </p>
<p>As Shakespeare understood, our fate depends on our ability to foster the humility and fellow feeling that will dethrone our god of money and transform it into a thing we use to advance our good and the good of others.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/143493/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Yachnin has received funding from SSHRC, the CFI, and FQRSC. </span></em></p>Shakespeare understood that our fate depends on fostering the humility and empathy that dethrones money and transforms it into something we use to advance the common good.Paul Yachnin, Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies, McGill UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1383652020-09-04T18:18:11Z2020-09-04T18:18:11Z‘From each according to ability; to each according to need’ – tracing the biblical roots of socialism’s enduring slogan<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/356431/original/file-20200903-16-gi34dn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C0%2C2316%2C1192&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Marx, Madison or God? Who said it first...or at all?</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> Bettmann/Corbis/ Lucas Schifres via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“From each according to ability; To each according to need,” is a phrase derived from where?</p>
<p>A) The works of Karl Marx</p>
<p>B) The Bible</p>
<p>C) The Constitution of the United States</p>
<p>If you answered “A,” you are kinda right. But if you answered “B,” you’re not exactly wrong either.</p>
<p>“C,” on the other hand, would get you zero points. But you would not be alone in getting it wrong. In a 1987 survey, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/02/15/constitution-confuses-most-americans/47e6691c-e42b-4276-8adb-ec1b24539954/">nearly half of Americans surveyed</a> believed the phrase “From each according to ability; To each according to need” came from the U.S. Constitution.</p>
<p>The phrase was, in fact, popularized by Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. But its origins are in France. </p>
<h2>From Paris to Moscow</h2>
<p>It occurs in the 1848 speeches of <a href="https://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/blanc.htm">the socialist politician Louis Blanc</a> and can be traced further back to the cover of the 1845 edition of philosopher Étienne Cabet’s utopian novel <a href="https://www.marxists.org/subject/utopian/cabet/icarus.htm">“Voyage en Icarie”</a>: “First right: To Live – To each according to his needs – First duty: To Work – From each according to his ability.”</p>
<p>But a decade and a half before Cabet, the followers of the French <a href="http://www.hetwebsite.net/het/profiles/saintsimon.htm">political theorist Henri de Saint-Simon</a> coined a similar phrase, “To each according to ability; To each according to works” as an epigraph of their journal L’Organisateur in 1829. </p>
<p>There is a constitution that contains a mix of both phrases, but it isn’t the U.S.’s. Rather it is <a href="https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.html">the Constitution of the USSR</a>. Joseph Stalin paired “From each according to ability” with “To each according to work” in <a href="https://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/36cons01.html">the 1936 Soviet Constitution</a>.</p>
<h2>Communal living</h2>
<p>So where does the Bible come in? Well, Saint-Simon, Cabet and Blanc – all committed Christians whose social programs were inspired by their faith – borrowed each of these phrases from French Bible translations of the time, and defended them on scriptural grounds. History of economics scholar <a href="https://adrienlutz.wordpress.com/">Adrien Lutz</a> and <a href="https://philosophy.unc.edu/people/luc-bovens/">I</a> <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article/51/2/237/137098/From-Each-according-to-Ability-To-Each-according">traced these phrases</a> back to <a href="https://read.dukeupress.edu/hope/article/51/2/237/137098/From-Each-according-to-Ability-To-Each-according">these French biblical passages</a>.</p>
<p>“To each according to needs” comes from the Book of Acts documenting the practices of early Christian communities in Jerusalem. In the Book of Acts, believers “<a href="https://biblehub.com/acts/2-44.htm">were together and had all things in common</a>” and sold their possessions and distributed the proceeds within the community “<a href="https://biblehub.com/acts/2-45.htm">as any had needs</a>.” </p>
<p>In “Voyage en Icarie,” Cabet tells of a fictional community who practice similar communal living arrangements. He later went to the U.S. and founded a number of “<a href="https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11182&context=annals-of-iowa#:%7E:text=%5ESpecifically%20the%20Icarian%20communities%20were,%2C%20California%2C%201881%2D1886.">Icarian communities</a>” in the second half of the 19th century, that practiced communal ownership of goods and were governed by egalitarian ideals. </p>
<p>“From each according to ability,” is likewise found in the Book of Acts: “<a href="https://biblehub.com/acts/11-29.htm">So the disciples determined, everyone according to his ability, to send relief to the brothers living in Judea</a>.” Cabet and Blanc both construed this phrase as a call for Christian servitude. They believed society to be a cooperative venture in which people of means should contribute more.</p>
<h2>Investing in talent</h2>
<p>“To each according to ability” is in the Gospel of Matthew. In the Parable of the Talents, a master gives his servants different amounts of money – or “talents” – and goes away on a journey: “<a href="https://biblehub.com/matthew/25-15.htm">To one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability</a>.” Upon his return, he praises the servants who have invested and increased their allotment but condemns the one who buried the money and simply returned it.</p>
<p>For Saint-Simon, the phrase meant putting jobs and resources in the hands of the most qualified and entrepreneurial people and taking them away from nobility. This would lead to greater productivity, benefiting everyone, and in particular, the most disadvantaged socioeconomic groups in society.</p>
<h2>Wages of virtue</h2>
<p>“To each according to works” occurs at many junctions in the Bible. For example, St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans states: “<a href="https://biblehub.com/romans/2-6.htm">[God] will render to each according to his works: To those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.</a>”</p>
<p>The phrase is also found it in First Corinthians: “<a href="https://biblehub.com/1_corinthians/3-8.htm">He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor.</a>” Whereas St. Paul’s letter makes rewards contingent on one’s achievements as a single individual, in Corinthians it measures the effort that one brings to a collective endeavor.</p>
<p>The same article in the Soviet Constitution that employs this phrase also contains a quote from a Bible passage found in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians: “<a href="https://biblehub.com/2_thessalonians/3-10.htm">If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.</a>”</p>
<p>The message is the same, but the background of this quote is interesting. St. Paul, the Christian apostle, believed that he and his co-workers did have a right to be maintained by the Church – presumably because their ministry was a sufficient contribution to the common good.</p>
<p>But they were facing an incentive problem: There were idle and disruptive elements in the Christian community who were trying to free-ride on the communal living arrangements. For this reason, even though they were doing ministry, St. Paul urges his followers to do manual labor to set a model and distance themselves from the free riders.</p>
<h2>Nothing new</h2>
<p>The sentiments behind these slogans are not confined to the ash heaps of history. Rather, many of the policies from the political left today fit under these simple slogans. </p>
<p>“To each according to need” can be applied to the debate over health care. The aim is to take the provision of health care away from market forces and to make it freely accessible to all who need it. “From each according to ability” is what underlies a concern for the common good and a conception of society as a cooperative venture, with mandatory public service as a matching policy proposal. </p>
<p>[<em>Deep knowledge, daily.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/the-daily-3?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=deepknowledge">Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>“To each according to ability” is at the core of equal opportunity – an ideal that underlies affirmative action legislation and various policies to increase the accessibility of college. “To each according to work” maps onto the ideal of equal pay for equal work and the push for minimal wage policies, mainly benefiting manual labor jobs. </p>
<p>Two millennia in the making, these phrases illustrate what is said in the book of Ecclesiastes: “<a href="https://biblehub.com/ecclesiastes/1-9.htm">There is nothing new under the sun.</a>”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/138365/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Luc Bovens does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>At the height of Reaganism, close to half of Americans believed a phrase popularized by Karl Marx actually derived from the US Constitution. It doesn’t, but scholars have traced it to the Bible.Luc Bovens, Professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel HillLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1364722020-05-26T12:20:42Z2020-05-26T12:20:42ZClap all you like now, but workers with meaningful jobs deserve to be valued in a post-coronavirus economy too<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337042/original/file-20200522-124840-1lrlsvn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C107%2C5982%2C3880&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Grocery workers have been essential during the pandemic. so should we be paying them more?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/fresh-direct-worker-in-protective-face-mask-and-gloves-news-photo/1226288895?adppopup=true">Rob Kim/Getty Images)</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The coronavirus recession has laid bare how illogically the U.S. labor market values work that matters.</p>
<p>In the United States, as elsewhere, citizens have been extolling the role of essential workers – such as nurses, grocery suppliers and delivery drivers – by, for example, <a href="https://abc7ny.com/health/quarantined-new-yorkers-clap-for-essential-workers-%7C-video/6060936/">rewarding them with nightly claps</a>. Yet many of these employees <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/04/06/why-do-so-many-essential-workers-get-paid-so-little-heres-what-economists-have-say/">receive low pay</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-shows-key-workers-need-better-pay-and-protection-heres-what-has-to-change-137037">few protections</a>, suggesting a different appreciation of their worth in the market.</p>
<p>But in highlighting this disconnect, perhaps the crisis has also provided an opportunity to reimagine an economy that values jobs for something more than just wealth creation: meaningfulness.</p>
<h2>A moral market?</h2>
<p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04389-0">Meaningfulness</a> has to do with how much one’s work matters in a moral sense, which is not always signified by how much money a job pays. It often relates to personal fulfillment from work but may also concern the social contribution work makes and what, morally, we ought to value. Contemporary social scientists and philosophers cite historical thinkers as diverse as <a href="https://hbr.org/2011/12/adam-smith-was-not-a-schizophr">Adam Smith</a> and <a href="https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/the-great-philosophers-karl-marx/">Karl Marx</a> as recognizing the potential for meaningless work to detract from human well-being.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, our labor market tends not to account adequately for morality. For example, it often assigns less tangible value, such as money, to meaningful work that is intangibly valuable. A high school teacher may have a harder time accounting for her share in the success of a former student’s business venture than does the investment banker who helped fund the startup. </p>
<p>Workers who risk their well-being to clean bedpans at hospitals and stock shelves at grocery stores may have only the reassurance that their work is essential to augment their relatively meager compensation.</p>
<p>To suggest that moral values should be more integral to the free market is neither anti-capitalist nor partisan. As an <a href="https://business.stthomas.edu/faculty-research/faculty-bios/michaelson-christopher/">ethics professor and business adviser</a>, I know it is widely accepted that markets are imperfect and require mediation to balance out inequities.</p>
<p>Even a celebrated market economist like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51877.Capitalism_and_Freedom">Milton Friedman recognized</a> that the free market undervalues some things. Accordingly, disruptions from events like the current pandemic warrant public and private sector coordination to ensure an adequate supply of essential goods and services. </p>
<h2>Checks and bank balances</h2>
<p>The recently passed <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/house-lawmakers-race-to-washington-to-ensure-coronavirus-stimulus-passes-11585318472">bipartisan stimulus</a> package that offers proportionately more to people who have less is consistent with this view that markets warrant intervention when it can stave off human suffering.</p>
<p>Similarly, wealthy individuals often <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaires-spending-hundreds-of-millions-on-coronavirus-research-2020-3">act generously</a> when they perceive distress that may be caused by unfairness in market mechanisms – for example, by <a href="https://www.si.com/nba/2020/03/14/nba-teams-players-help-pay-workers">donating money to make up for lost wages</a>. But this only highlights a system that rewards some people with so much wealth that they can cover the missed paychecks of hundreds or thousands of others.</p>
<p>But I would argue that bailout checks and individual acts of kindness are not nearly enough. They may even have the <a href="https://hbr.org/2016/10/praising-customers-for-ethical-purchases-can-backfire">unintended consequence of moral licensing</a> – creating the false impression among individuals that they have fully done their part to mitigate the problem. </p>
<p>Laid-off workers having to look for new work in what could be a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-19/global-downturn-risks-becoming-prolonged-recession-wef-says">prolonged, post-pandemic recession</a> will not find long-term stability in temporary infusions of cash and charity. Economic and social recovery will require the creation of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/economy/coronavirus-unemployment-claims.html">tens of millions of jobs for those who have filed unemployment claims</a>. But we should also be looking to promote meaningful work in a post-pandemic economy through the rewarding of pay that is proportional to a work’s meaningfulness.</p>
<p><a href="https://fortune.com/2020/03/20/essential-workers-government-list-employees-coronavirus/">Work deemed essential</a> in the pandemic has taken on more meaning because it is urgent to people now. However, even after this crisis has passed, much of this work will continue to be essential to our society.</p>
<p>Meaningfulness can also apply to work that seems less urgent but nonetheless important, such as the concerts and performances that we are now missing. Unfortunately, funding for the <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/leeseymour/2020/04/16/de-blasios-new-budget-would-decimate-new-york-theaters-already-reeling-from-pandemic/#662456d41b40">arts</a> and <a href="https://timesofsandiego.com/education/2020/05/16/california-teachers-face-layoffs-as-pandemic-forces-big-state-budget-cuts/">public education</a> is an easy target when budgets are strapped.</p>
<p>In times of disaster, those who are most vulnerable are often those who are harmed the most, a phenomenon called <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1376863.At_Risk">differential exposure</a>. For example, during the pandemic, the lower an employee ranks in an organizational hierarchy, the <a href="https://time.com/5795651/coronavirus-workers-economy-inequality/">more likely they are to encounter frontline hazards</a>.</p>
<p>Similarly, when we emerge from the economic aspect of this disaster, as after the <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/the-new-gilded-age-income-inequality-in-the-u-s-by-state-metropolitan-area-and-county/">Great Recession</a>, those who already had the greatest financial means are likely to be the most prepared to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-wealthreport/worlds-rich-got-richer-amid-09-recession-report-idUSTRE65L36T20100622">increase their wealth</a>.</p>
<h2>More than applause</h2>
<p>If we allow that return to economic normalcy, ordinary workers who have suffered greater losses in the downturn will also be in the most uncertain position to benefit from the recovery. Americans could redress this by reprioritizing the place of meaningfulness in how they measure and remunerate work that matters.</p>
<p>Of course, restructuring the economy to recognize meaningfulness is complex and some would say fanciful. But I believe the moral values of our markets are a reflection of our individual and social values. And there are things that can be done to move in that direction: Prospective employees can pursue work that makes a moral contribution to society, companies can adopt more socially conscious statements of purpose and policymakers can look at ways to better acknowledge the nonmonetary contribution of work to society. </p>
<p>After this pandemic is over, health care workers should still be <a href="https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/watch-videos-of-tonights-massive-citywide-clap-for-essential-workers-040320/">greeted with nightly applause</a>, grocery store workers <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-25/supermarket-clerks-heroes-new-first-responders-coronavirus">should still be treated as heroes</a> and delivery drivers should still be <a href="https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/living/video/man-left-hand-sanitizer-toilet-paper-doorstep-delivery-69924269">surprised with gifts</a>. It would be nice if they were paid accordingly too. </p>
<p>[<em>Insight, in your inbox each day.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=insight">You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/136472/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher Michaelson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>After the pandemic is over, grocery workers and nurses will still be essential. But will they be paid any better?Christopher Michaelson, Professor of Ethics and Business Law, University of St. ThomasLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1248132019-10-18T10:01:31Z2019-10-18T10:01:31ZOnkgopotse Tiro: revolutionary who paid a heavy price for shaking apartheid to its core<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297643/original/file-20191018-56215-1hgbigw.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Onkgopotse Tiro</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Book cover</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The book, <a href="https://www.takealot.com/parcel-of-death/PLID55073335">“Parcel of Death”</a>, is a journey to a revolutionary past. It is a journey but not a return to the past. Former journalist <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.co.za/blogs/news/writing-the-little-told-story-of-onkgopotse-tiro">Gaongalelwe Tiro</a> has written a book about his uncle Onkgopotse Tiro – a revolutionary spirit who powered the student <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/june-16-soweto-youth-uprising">uprisings of June 1976</a> in Soweto, Guguletu – Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Umlazi – Durban, Bloemfontein and Pietermaritzburg. </p>
<p>It is the same spirit that was to galvanise another generation decades later in the <a href="https://theconversation.com/feesmustfall-the-poster-child-for-new-forms-of-struggle-in-south-africa-68773">fees must fall</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/it-will-take-critical-thorough-scrutiny-to-truly-decolonise-knowledge-78477">decolonisation </a> movements at the turn of the century.</p>
<p>Tiro was a student leader at the University of the North, now <a href="https://www.ul.ac.za/index.php?Entity=Home">University of Limpopo</a>, in the early 1970s and one of the early exponents of the revolutionary Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa. He fled to exile in Botswana, where he was killed by a parcel bomb in 1974. It has always been suspected that it was sent by the apartheid security forces.</p>
<p>The book begins with a chapter entitled: “Blown to Smithereens”. The power and emotion contained in this chapter is enough to stop you from continuing. Even though I know the events that are described in the chapter and, had my own emotion and response on the morning of the day in February 1974 when the news of Tiro’s assassination came through, I still read the chapter over and over and hesitated to face up to subsequent chapters.</p>
<h2>Onkgopotse Tiro</h2>
<p>Onkgopotse Tiro was born in Dinokana Village outside the small town of Zeerust, in what is now known as the <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/place/north-west">North West Province</a>, South Africa. These origins automatically define him as son of poor parents.</p>
<p>Like other African young men and women, Tiro somehow managed to make it to university. For him, being of a particular tribal origin, it could only be University of the North, also known as Turfloop, a blacks-only university for students designated for the Tswana, Sotho, Pedi, Venda and <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/tswana">Shangaan tribes</a>, located east of Polokwane. This, in line with the Apartheid racist segregation policies of the white minority state of the time.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/297534/original/file-20191017-98648-3aqqvl.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1142&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>The family and social background and experiences that Onkgopotse brought to the university immediately came into conflict with the colonial and racial texture inscribed in every facet of the university life. The critical, questioning mind of the soon to be born philosophy of <a href="http://azapo.org.za/about-azapo/black-consciousness/">Black Consciousness</a> soon showed its real character when Tiro and other black students immersed themselves in debates about how they should organise themselves around their own reality, black reality.</p>
<p>Political existentialism was the core mark of the strategy of black resistance by university students in those early days of black consciousness. Tiro was a key leader in this regard and, this is how this revolutionary edge catapulted him to the helm of student political organisation.</p>
<p>The anger of the white racist administrators and staff at the university and on behalf of all other white racists was provoked beyond measure when Tiro <a href="http://azapo.org.za/graduation-speech-by-onkgopotse-tiro-at-the-university-of-the-north-29-april-1972/">delivered a graduation speech</a> in 1972, that ignited black student political uprising throughout the land.</p>
<p>Thus in the first chapter the author details the events preceding, surrounding and, following the assassination of Tiro. The book depicts how Tiro’s time at Turfloop amounted to a revolutionising political script for generations to come. It is particularly helpful to have this history of the Black Consciousness Movement which provides background to the later assassination of <a href="http://azapo.org.za/azapohistory/bantu-stephen-biko/">Steve Biko</a>, who similarly died brutally at the hands of agents of a white racist regime.</p>
<p>The message is simple: White supremacists murdered Onkgopotse Tiro. They also murdered his associates, <a href="https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/mthuli-ka-shezi">Mthuli Ka Shezi</a>, <a href="http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/national-orders/recipient/mapetla-mohapi-1947-1976">Mapetla Mohapi</a> and Steve Biko. The list is long.</p>
<p>Students of Black Consciousness need to grasp this in order to understand the movement and the people that Tiro died for. Deliberately, or not, the author’s choice of the starting point for the biography of his late uncle is inspired by the same spirit that shook the foundations of a racist settler-colonial regime.</p>
<p>The rest of the book walks back to the events that led to Tiro’s assassination. It is a biography that refuses to engage in political narcissism. Its story comes back to us from the future. We understand who Tiro was through the lens of what happened long after he was no more.</p>
<p>It is well written and does not confuscate, not even politically or ideologically. Through the chapters that follow the first one, we come to meet and know the people who gave birth to a movement and died for a country. We also come to understand how relationships change even among the closest of comrades. Readers will be served with the truth of events and intricacies that professional historians and ideologues <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-steve-bikos-remarkable-legacy-often-overlooked-82952">conceal for no good reason</a>.</p>
<p>The biographer is more than a family member. He is himself a player, activist and combatant in the theatre of struggle in which his uncle’s extinction was plotted and carried out. He navigates the terrain professionally and does so like a revolutionary.</p>
<p>The writer shares the initial circumstances that surrounded the moment of political ignition that led to expulsion of Tiro from the University of the North and set the country on fire. This discussion happens, rightfully, later in the book. It helps to remove the temptation to write the story chronologically. As we have said, the story of Onkgopotse Tiro comes to us from the future. For indeed, in his life story, to borrow from <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf">Karl Marx’s unforgettable words,</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>the phrase does not go beyond the content; the content goes beyond the phrase.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a story that draws its “poetry from the future”.</p>
<p>The book, therefore, shares snippets of the famous graduation speech that led to Tiro’s expulsion from Turfloop and subsequently galvanized black students in all the black campuses to solidarity action. </p>
<p>The rest is history.</p>
<p>The real pity, though, is that the biographer deprived the readers of Tiro’s speech in its totality. It is not enough to have quoted parts of it. It is a classic by itself and in its own right.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/124813/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Itumeleng Mosala has received funding from universities for his research. He is a patron of the June 16, 1976 Foundation and the owner of Still Nascent Ventures (Pty) Ltd. He is a member of the Azanian People's Organisation and the party's past president. </span></em></p>The book depicts how Onkgopotse Tiro’s time at Turfloop amounted to a revolutionising political script for generations to come.Itumeleng Mosala, Research Associate professor, University of PretoriaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1127852019-04-15T11:25:53Z2019-04-15T11:25:53ZWhy the world is due a revolution in economics education<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267298/original/file-20190403-177178-4udx5c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/trade-union-advisory-committee-meeting-audience-522681064">Matej Kastelic/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Economic thinking governs much of our world. But the discipline’s teaching is stuck in the past. Centred around antiquated 19th-century models built on Newtonian physics, economics treats humans as atomic particles, rather than as social beings.</p>
<p>While academic research often manages to <a href="https://books.wwnorton.com/books/Economics-Rules/">transcend this simplicity</a>, undergraduate education <a href="http://economicseducation.org/">does not</a> – and the influence of these simplified ideas is carried by graduates as they go on to work in politics, media, business and the civil service. </p>
<p>Economists such as myself tend to speak in tightly coded jargon and mathematical models. We speak of “economic laws”, tacitly positioning these as analogous to the laws of physics. We wrap a thick layer of technical jargon around our study material and ban all moral or ethical discussions from the classroom. We attempt to take cover under the protective white lab coat of “real science”, a phenomenon described by Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek as <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1974/hayek/lecture/#not1">scientism</a>.</p>
<p>In short, economics has become a rather quaint and highly guarded discipline. We urgently need to update economics education to change this – because economics, as taught in universities, does not reflect or speak to many of the issues of the real world, be they political, environmental or social.</p>
<h2>The political economy</h2>
<p>Take the tricky entanglement between politics and economics, which economists tend to try to avoid. Such an attempt is futile. Sidelining politics, history and broader ideas while teaching economics, as most professors do, is like studying the “natural” flows of water in the Netherlands without taking into account that there are people living there who are steering it, building dikes, reclaiming land and channelling the water – and ignoring that they have been doing this for thousands of years already. You can’t study the system while ignoring the people who make it.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267359/original/file-20190403-177171-qu0mwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267359/original/file-20190403-177171-qu0mwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267359/original/file-20190403-177171-qu0mwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267359/original/file-20190403-177171-qu0mwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267359/original/file-20190403-177171-qu0mwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267359/original/file-20190403-177171-qu0mwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267359/original/file-20190403-177171-qu0mwb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Adam Smith.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/43/Adam_Smith_The_Muir_portrait.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Politics and economics are inextricably intertwined, as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx knew all too well. Somehow this has been forgotten. This does not mean economists need to get political or choose sides. But it does mean that we ignore politics at our own peril – by blindsiding ourselves or dismissing it as “external stuff”, we hamper our understanding of the very system we study.</p>
<p>Economists speak in numbers only, clinging to statistical data and quantitative models. We do so in the hope of looking objective. But this is counter-productive – “data” <a href="https://theconversation.com/economics-must-reform-but-data-cant-tell-us-everything-20664">cannot tell us everything</a>. Other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology use a broader range of methods, and consequently have a broader perspective on society. If we take our societal role of adviser on economic matters seriously, we will need to open up and <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-the-financial-crisis-we-need-a-new-way-to-teach-ppe-25678">adopt the insights</a> that these other disciplines bring us about how the economy works.</p>
<p>It is true that academic economists are aware of the <a href="http://chrisauld.com/2013/10/23/18-signs-youre-reading-bad-criticism-of-economics/">shortcomings</a> of their discipline. But unfortunately, this awareness of the complexity of the economic system does not necessarily extend to those who leave university after their degree. And this is what the vast majority of economics graduates do. These are the people who go on to work in big business, governments and central banks, who shape policy and create our “economic common sense”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267361/original/file-20190403-177171-t1rxdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267361/original/file-20190403-177171-t1rxdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267361/original/file-20190403-177171-t1rxdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267361/original/file-20190403-177171-t1rxdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267361/original/file-20190403-177171-t1rxdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267361/original/file-20190403-177171-t1rxdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/267361/original/file-20190403-177171-t1rxdm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Commuting into the City of London.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/morning-commuters-london-74571400">R.nagy/Shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Educational blinders</h2>
<p>So what sort of ideas do these undergraduate economics students take out of university and into some of the most important careers in our societies? </p>
<p>Concerned student groups everywhere have started to systematically map this out. Student members of the University of Manchester Post-Crash Economics Association wrote <a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526110138/">a book</a> surveying 174 economics modules at seven leading UK universities. They found that fewer than 10% covered anything other than mainstream economics. In the Netherlands, students <a href="https://www.economicseducation.org/">found</a> that real-world problems, from climate change to inequality, were seriously treated in only 6% of all modules and that only 2% of methods courses were not focused on statistical work. </p>
<iframe title="Economic approaches" aria-label="Interactive pie chart" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/AFpLO/3/" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" width="100%" height="700"></iframe>
<p>A series of subsequent curriculum review projects, including one covering 13 countries from Argentina to Israel, <a href="https://oikos-international.org/news/mapping-pluralist-research-report-published/?fbclid=IwAR209jKkTbr_VJa5zg5uw3fTOMhS7FZbboB_7kjmWrRwW_GFHNM31NQik5g">found similar conditions</a> in economics programs everywhere.</p>
<p>Undergraduate economists all over the world learn theories from textbooks that have barely changed since the 1950s. Those theories are based on individual agents, competing in markets to maximise narrowly defined “economic utility” (for people) or profit (for firms). The principles are taught with the same certainty as Newtonian physics, and are as devoid of value judgements.</p>
<p>This is absurd. Clearly, there are values; mainstream economics values efficiency, markets and growth – and puts individuals over collectives. Yet undergraduates are not taught to recognise, let alone question, these values – and the consequences are serious. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/shut-down-business-schools-two-professors-debate-96166">Shut down business schools? Two professors debate</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The models taught in our education ignore inequality, while our societies are being torn apart by it. In our classes, relentless economic growth is an unquestioned dogma, yet this same economic growth is <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/114/30/E6089.short">rapidly ripping apart</a> the ecological foundations of our world. And while we all may individually donate to charities, separate our trash and feel guilty about flying too much, we are collectively handicapped in reforming the very system that drives these problems.</p>
<h2>Hope for change</h2>
<p>There is <a href="https://www.economicseducation.org/pluralist-programs">hope for change</a>, however. In the UK, <a href="http://reteacheconomics.org/courses/">a number of economics programmes</a> are gradually becoming more pluralist in terms of theory and methods in response to the movement. Goldsmiths College in London, for instance, has renewed its <a href="https://theconversation.com/after-the-financial-crisis-we-need-a-new-way-to-teach-ppe-25678">PPE programme</a> to include the same, and add other disciplines. And the Schumacher College in Devon now offers an <a href="https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/courses/postgraduate-courses/economics-for-transition">Economics for Transition</a> MSc which explicitly ties together economic and ecological systems. Meanwhile, an international <a href="https://economicpluralism.org/accreditation/">accreditation system</a> for pluralist Masters programmes is being set up.</p>
<p>But we need renewal on a much broader front: a new approach to economics education, one which does not hide behind the self-imposed limits of 19th century physics-style modelling, but instead considers the societal role of economists seriously. We need an economics which focuses on the entire economic system and which acknowledges all relevant sources of knowledge, rather than apprehensively clinging to statistical data. And one which addresses the issues that are most pressing for society, not those that comfortably fit within its <a href="https://theconversation.com/300-000-women-are-missing-from-economics-84152">mainstream method</a>. </p>
<p>Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait for the present generation of economists to retire before this can happen. By that time, it might be too late.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/112785/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joris Tieleman is a co-founder of Rethinking Economics in the Netherlands. He does part-time work for Our New Economy, a charity dedicated to a fairer, more sustainable economic system. This project has received a €5.000 Grant for Small Groups from the ISRF. </span></em></p>In economics classes, relentless growth is an unquestioned dogma. Yet this same economic growth is rapidly ripping apart the ecological foundations of our world.Joris Tieleman, PhD Candidate, Erasmus University RotterdamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1072302019-04-08T14:07:25Z2019-04-08T14:07:25ZMaking sense of the world: why ‘Marxism and Freedom’ still resonates<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/267791/original/file-20190405-180020-neae93.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Raya Dunayevskaya believed "Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing."</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dunayevskaya-raya.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The world’s a mess. How do thoughtful people make sense of it all? In this series we’ve asked a number of our authors to suggest a book, philosopher, work of art – or anything else, for that matter – that will help to make sense of it all.</em> </p>
<p>The world we live in is a dangerous and confusing place. In my quest to make sense of it, I’m returning to <a href="https://www.imhojournal.org/publications/marxism-and-freedom-from-1776-until-today/"><em>Marxism and Freedom</em></a> – 40 years after reading it for the first time.</p>
<p>It was written by the founder of the philosophy of Marxist-Humanism, <a href="https://newsandletters.org/raya-dunayevskaya/">Raya Dunayevskaya</a> (1910–1987). I read the book for the first time in 1979: the year <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/margaretthatcher">Margaret Thatcher</a> was elected in Britain, and the formal beginning of the <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/david-harvey-neoliberalism-capitalism-labor-crisis-resistance/">neoliberal counter-revolution</a>. Dunayevskaya called it a “changed world”. At that point the book was already over 20 years old, but I found something refreshing about its engagement with Marxism as a living philosophy connected with daily life struggles. </p>
<p>My return to <em>Marxism and Freedom</em> here in 2019 has focused on some of its ideas that might help orient our thinking in the present. This, at a time when we’re facing the morbid stages of neoliberalism in its neo-fascist and authoritarian-nationalist forms: from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to Donald Trump in the US, from Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.</p>
<p>Dunayevskaya (who was born Raya Shpigel but took her mother’s maiden name) was not an academic but a revolutionary intellectual schooled by organisations and their struggles. She joined the revolutionary movement in the United States as a teenager in the early 1920s, and was kicked out of the Communist Party at age 18 after asking for a discussion about <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/leon-trotsky">Leon Trotsky</a>. He was a leading Marxist revolutionary who was expelled from the USSR in 1929 after criticising Joseph Stalin.</p>
<p>Dunayevskaya joined the Trotskyist movement. She is probably best known as Trotsky’s Russian language secretary in Mexico, which is where he settled after his expulsion and where he was assassinated in 1940. By the time he died, Dunayevskaya had broken with Trotsky over his defence of the Soviet Union after the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. </p>
<p>She argued that Russia was a state-capitalist rather than a socialist society, and held that Marx’s theory of liberation had been transformed into its opposite by the Communist Party intelligentsia to justify a ruthless totalitarian system. </p>
<h2>New passions</h2>
<p>“Marxism is a theory of liberation or it is nothing” Dunayevskaya held in <em>Marxism and Freedom</em>. Concerned with the freedom of humanity and the destruction of human life under capitalism, one aim of <em>Marxism and Freedom</em> was to,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>reestablish Marxism in its original form, which Marx called ‘a thoroughgoing Naturalism, or Humanism’. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Prefiguring what is now called intersectionality, she highlighted “new passions and new forces” that emerged in freedom struggles. She argued that activists and intellectuals must keep their ears open to these new voices and new articulations of freedom that had often been silenced or ignored. </p>
<p>Dunayevskaya <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1963/american-civilization.htm">considered</a> black liberation movements the vanguard of historical freedom struggles in the United States.</p>
<p>She also <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nationalism-Communism-Afro-Asian-Revolutions-Dunayevskaya/dp/B001QYPAS6">declared</a> the African and Asian decolonisation movements that developed after the end of World War II epochal, as they <a href="https://archive.org/details/DunayevskayaNationalismCommunismMarxistHumanismTheAfroAsianRevolutions/page/n39">raised</a> the question of human relations as a “totality of devotion to the struggle for freedom”.</p>
<p>The brilliance of <em>Marxism and Freedom</em>, and its re-articulation of Marx’s Marxism as a theory of liberation, is that it was written in collaboration with miners, autoworkers and students who contributed to “a new understanding”. The point was not only that people think, but also that people in struggles develop new ways of knowing through experience, dialogue and self-reflection. </p>
<p>The question of freedom was intimately connected to the question that every struggle needs to ask itself: what happens the day after the struggle has seemingly been won? In short, Dunayevskaya continually challenged activists to think beyond activism: to think not only of tearing down the old society, but also about creating a new one. She believed in questioning everything, especially the division between intellectual and physical labour. </p>
<h2>A legacy of learning</h2>
<p>All this was exciting to me as a 21-year-old who had already become cynical about programmatic socialist groups that often viewed movements as fodder to be mobilised. I probably didn’t understand it fully at the time, but I remember meeting Dunayevskaya in 1985 just after the year-long British miners strike had suffered an <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2014/06/how-miners-strike-1984-85-changed-britain-ever">historic defeat</a>.</p>
<p>When we met she had just completed a book <a href="https://philpapers.org/rec/DUNRLW"><em>Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution</em></a>, the last part of her “trilogy of revolution” (her second book was the 1973 <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/phil-rev/index.htm"><em>Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre and from Marx</em></a>). Asked about love in an interview on International Women’s Day in 1984 she <a href="https://newsandletters.org/writings-raya-dunayevskaya-womens-liberation-experimentation-revolution-permanence/">remarked</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t think it’s correct for us to try and solve it for others. I think what we have to do is to create the conditions for everyone to be able to experiment with choices, in love. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>When we met she spoke to me about the importance of worker-intellectuals to Marxist-Humanism. Here she included the black auto worker from Detroit, Charles Denby, the author of <a href="https://newsandletters.org/charles-denbys-life-story-story-struggle-freedom/"><em>Indignant Heart: A Black Worker’s Journal</em></a>. They met in the late 1940s and remained colleagues until his death in 1983. </p>
<p>When Stalin died in 1953 Denby phoned her. He wanted to tell her what the workers in the plant were saying: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have just the man to fill Stalin’s shoes — my foreman.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Alive today</h2>
<p><em>Marxism and Freedom</em> remains alive to me in 2019. It’s not only because we live in an age of myriad crises that threaten humanity, but the book reminds humanity to keep our ears and minds open to new and often unthinkable revolts.</p>
<p>In this moment of violent suppression, new forms of struggle continuously emerge and reach for a future. It is here that the ideal and the real are revealed as being not far apart: where Marx’s humanism as a living body of ideas is enlivened by real movements for freedom.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/107230/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nigel Gibson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The book, Marxism and Freedom was written in 1958. Yet, it remains relevant today.Nigel Gibson, Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Emerson CollegeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1116522019-02-15T12:10:24Z2019-02-15T12:10:24ZMarx and Thatcher: how memorials have become the lightning rods of 21st-century protest<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/259268/original/file-20190215-56229-1wzbhsq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Marx's tombstone was vandalised with a hammer in February 2019.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paasikivi via Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In January 2018, Westminster Council <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2018/jan/23/plans-margaret-thatcher-statue-westminster-rejected">turned down plans</a> for a four-metre high statue of Margaret Thatcher in Parliament Square. The council explained that a new statue in the square, which is already home to Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela, would lead to “monument saturation”. </p>
<p>But there were also concerns that a memorial in London to Britain’s first female prime minister – still a divisive figure – would be likely to provoke protest and potential vandalism. A year later, when Grantham – where Thatcher grew up – announced it would <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-47134760">host the memorial</a>, it said the 10-foot statue would be placed on a plinth of equal height to deter vandals. </p>
<p>At around the same time this decision was announced, on February 5, the grave stone of Karl Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/05/karl-marx-london-grave-vandalised-suspected-hammer-attack-highgate-cemetery">was vandalised</a> by an unknown assailant using a hammer. The chief executive of the charity that maintains the cemetery has remarked that the Grade I listed monument would “never be the same again”. A fortnight before that, the RAF Bomber Command Memorial in London’s Green Park was similarly vandalised, although this time the perpetrators used white paint. It was the fourth time in only six years that the memorial has been defaced.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, various other memorials are provoking increasingly intense debate, especially in the US and Britain, where campaigns for the removal of statues of Confederate leaders, transatlantic slavers, and empire builders continue to garner support. So why are memorials and monuments provoking such interest and even anger?</p>
<h2>Power and memory</h2>
<p>In part, the answer is that this is by no means new. After all, despite their apparent “concrete” qualities, memorials invariably provoke intense debate – and those arguments do not simply disappear once the memorial is built. This is particularly the case following regime change: see, for example, the attacks made on royalist sculptures and statues during the American Revolution or the removal of Soviet era statues in places like Hungary and Poland. </p>
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</figure>
<p>And who can forget the iconic images of the toppling of the huge statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad during the invasion by US-led forces in 2003? To destroy or remove a memorial is a recognised mechanism through which a newly arrived power asserts its presence and delegitimises its predecessor.</p>
<p>Of course, such moments of “regime change” are relatively rare – and the recent acts of vandalism noted above are clearly of a different order and scale. But they are indicative of the same essential truth: that public sculpture is always inherently political. Seen in this light, a society’s commemorative architecture is a very visible record of its politics of power. </p>
<p>This would explain why in Britain the memorial landscape bequeathed by the Victorians and Edwardians is so disproportionately <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2016/03/i-sorted-uk-s-statues-gender-mere-27-cent-are-historical-non-royal-women">white and male</a>. This was the class and gender in power – and the events and individuals they commemorated are, in a sense, reflections of themselves. </p>
<p>It was a similar situation in the early 20th-century American South, an age of legalised segregation and racist violence – and the Confederate memorials made in its midst are its commemorative signature, the architecture of Jim Crow. For many African-Americans, these were the purposefully intimidating statues often established in Southern cities by the very same people as were simultaneously adding racially discriminatory statutes to Southern law books. In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights campaign launched a courageous attack on the law books – but many of the statues remain.</p>
<h2>Contesting the past</h2>
<p>In recent years, various interest groups have emerged to contest the existing commemorative landscape, challenges that are expressive of a thriving politics of social protest – as well as of changing ideas of exactly what and who is worthy of veneration. Those involved, many of whom are simultaneously protesting against inequalities in the present, rightly perceive that public sculpture is never value-free. This is why they question the continued legitimacy of signs and symbols that are decidedly out of step with the values of 21st-century multicultural democracy – see, for instance, the ongoing debate about the legacy of the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-bristol-45825768">slave-trader Edward Colston</a> in Bristol. </p>
<p>These challenges and campaigns have in turn helped produce new statues suggestive of modern ideals, such as the one dedicated to Millicent Fawcett in London, or the removal of “old” statues to those now seen as divisive figures, such as the memorials to Confederate leaders in the US.</p>
<p>But on the other hand, this era of engaged commemorative discussion and debate has also produced a far more shadowy set of activities: acts of monument vandalism. Such acts are clearly very different in purpose and process to the carefully planned removal of, for instance, Confederate memorials, with the latter the product of local campaigns and legislative oversight. But acts of vandalism nonetheless exist at the other – illegitimate – end of the same spectrum of activity, one which finds in certain monuments a power and presence to contest.</p>
<p>This has also been intensified by the rise of social media, where details of a planned attack – or some other form of “intervention” – can circulate and recirculate and draw new waves of energy, support or anger. And this can double back on the memorial itself. Suddenly, thanks to the echo chambers of social media, a statue that has been in place for longer than anyone can remember, takes on new meaning and potency. </p>
<p>This is becoming increasingly visible given the social fractures and fissures recently exposed in the US, Britain and Europe by the rise of new populist nationalisms as well as the connected emergence of competing visions of both the past and present. In this moment, the stone and statuary of earlier times have become the lightning rods of a politics of protest and counter-protest as various groups and individuals contest the commemorative landscape of 21st-century society – both in situ and online.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111652/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam Edwards has previously received funding from the ESRC, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and the US Army Military History Institute.</span></em></p>Statues to divisive figures are increasingly becoming the target of protest and vandalism.Sam Edwards, Senior Lecturer in History, Manchester Metropolitan UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1019582018-09-23T15:30:37Z2018-09-23T15:30:37ZThe Catholic Church is a rich male collective<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237534/original/file-20180921-129868-1x7yqbr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A religion sociologist discovers that his criticism of the Church is based on lies. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I’m a typical sociologist, meaning I am skeptical about religion and human spirituality. Although I attended Catholic Church as a small child, I could see the hypocrisy, even as a child. I rejected that religion at an early age. </p>
<p>My undergraduate sociological training reinforced my atheism. My sociological lectures and sociological canons all decried and denounced the irrationality of human religion. </p>
<p>I dutifully read Marx’s <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/index.htm"><em>Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right</em></a> and <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/karl-marx-on-religion-251019">dismissed religion</a> as an opiate delusion. I understood from Max Weber that religion was <a href="http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/sociology/sociology-of-religion-max-weber/43751">pure ideology</a>, and made an oath not to get fooled again. I agreed with Peter Berger that religions were superstitions <a href="https://csrs.nd.edu/assets/50014/secularism_in_retreat.html">“beyond the pale”</a> of respectable discussions.</p>
<p>At one point, I’d even have gone go so far as to call myself a devotee of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who sees religion as — among other more negative things — a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/science/20dawkins.html">crime against childhood</a>. </p>
<p>Like a lot of my sociological colleagues, I heaped derision on the faithful. However, one day I decided to put aside my sociological roots and take a closer look myself. </p>
<h2>Religion is the problem</h2>
<p>As a researcher who looks at religions, I dug around and I was surprised by what I found.</p>
<p>I looked at the <a href="https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/cjs/index.php/CJS/article/view/20000">Western Tarot</a> and found it was created as a propaganda tool. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237537/original/file-20180921-129856-1pllrld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237537/original/file-20180921-129856-1pllrld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237537/original/file-20180921-129856-1pllrld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237537/original/file-20180921-129856-1pllrld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237537/original/file-20180921-129856-1pllrld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=569&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237537/original/file-20180921-129856-1pllrld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=569&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237537/original/file-20180921-129856-1pllrld.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=569&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hand-drawn, grungy, textured Tarot cards depicting the concept of Death and Judgement.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I discovered the remarkable story of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bartolome-de-Las-Casas">Bartolomé de Las Casas,</a> a brutal colonizer who one day <a href="https://www.athensjournals.gr/social/2018-5-3-1-Sosteric.pdf">saw the light and decided to fight for the slaves instead of immolating them</a>. </p>
<p>I read the research of psychology professor <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abraham-H-Maslow">Abraham Harold Maslow,</a> who said everyone has a mystical experience. I examined the origins of global beliefs and found that although our beliefs are different, <a href="https://theconversation.com/star-wars-is-a-religion-that-primes-us-for-war-and-violence-89443">they seem to originate from the same place.</a></p>
<p>After this research, I wondered why the sociological “founders” had mostly ignored these <a href="http://www.sagepub.net/isa/resources/ebulletin_pdf/EBul-Sosteric-Jul2017.pdf">mystical experiences.</a> I decided to pick up the Bible and read; I was surprised by what I learned.</p>
<h2>Jesus was a revolutionary leader</h2>
<p>I expected to find either a passive shepherd who had died for our sins or a shady street corner dealer waiting for the next addict.</p>
<p>What I found instead was a <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+15%3A12-15&version=NIV">modest, egalitarian</a> but charismatic and <a href="https://www.academia.edu/34970150/Rock_and_Roll_Jesus_Part_One_Anti-authoritarian_Political_Emancipator_and_Revolutionary_Liberator">revolutionary</a> leader. The text I read showed that he was a leader who <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+22%3A23-30&version=NIV">thought of women as equals</a>, didn’t like <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+2%3A13-17&version=NIV">commercial activity</a>, didn’t think <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+2%3A13-17&version=NIV">the rich could be authentic</a> and <em>absolutely hated</em> the wealthy local elites. </p>
<p>He told his students to be cautious of elites because <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+16%3A+5-12&version=NIV">“they are corrupt”</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+15:14&version=NIV">lead people astray.</a> </p>
<p>He said “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23%3A+1-3&version=NIV">they do not practise what they preach”</a> and called them <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+23%3A+13-32&version=NIV">wicked, blind, self-indulgent, hypocrite fools; pretty on the outside but rotten and unclean deep within</a>.</p>
<p>After reading the Gospels, it seemed to me that in the story, Jesus was a charismatic <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+4%3A+14-15&version=NIV">and popular</a> revolutionary who had angered local elites and was assassinated as a result. </p>
<h2>The big lie</h2>
<p>The elites were afraid that should <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+11%3A+45-50&version=NIV">the people crown this new leader king</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+21%3A+6-11&version=NIV">as they seemed ready to do</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+11%3A+45-50&version=NIV">they would lose their control of power</a>. </p>
<p>To head off the threat, the top male elites, the “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+11%3A+45-47&version=NIV">chief priests and the Pharisees</a>”), convened their version of the Supreme Court (<a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Sanhedrin">the Sanhedrin</a>) and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+11%3A+45-50&version=NIV">plotted an untimely death for Jesus</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237604/original/file-20180923-88806-1h6ak5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/237604/original/file-20180923-88806-1h6ak5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237604/original/file-20180923-88806-1h6ak5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237604/original/file-20180923-88806-1h6ak5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237604/original/file-20180923-88806-1h6ak5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237604/original/file-20180923-88806-1h6ak5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/237604/original/file-20180923-88806-1h6ak5i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=533&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Vatican City is a symbol of the Catholic Church’s enormous wealth.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To accomplish their goal, the elites told <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+11%3A45-54&version=NIV">a lie, what I call the “Caiaphas Lie,” to turn the people against him</a>. Once the lie spread as truth, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+11%3A+54&version=NIV">Jesus went into hiding</a> but was arrested by local elites who <a href="https://www.academia.edu/34970150/Rock_and_Roll_Jesus_Part_One_Anti-authoritarian_Political_Emancipator_and_Revolutionary_Liberator">threatened Roman leaders into a public shaming and brutal execution</a>.</p>
<p>To my sociologically trained eye, the assassination was a clear attempt to suppress teachings that awakened the public to elite corruption. It was designed to put the public back to sleep. </p>
<p>Unfortunately for the elites, their first suppression attempt didn’t work. The assassination turned Jesus into a martyr, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+12%3A19-24&version=NIV">as he himself knew it would</a>. </p>
<p>After his death, the word spread fast, with <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+2%3A+41&version=NIV">thousands</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+4%3A+4&version=NIV">thousands</a> of Jews and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+10%3A+44-45&version=NIV">gentiles</a> being converted at once. </p>
<p>We see the conversion of <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+10%3A+23-26&version=NIV">Roman centurions</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+6%3A7&version=NIV">traditional priests</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+8%3A+26-38&version=NIV">foreign state officials</a> and top-level elites (e.g., Saul’s Conversion in Acts 9). There is conversion “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+13%3A+49&version=NIV">through the whole region</a>” — <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+14&version=NIV">Iconium, Lystra, Derbe, Syria</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+16&version=NIV">Philippi</a>,<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+17&version=NIV">Thessalonica, Berea, Athens</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+18&version=NIV">Corinth</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+19&version=NIV">Ephesus</a>. </p>
<p>Christ’s martyrdom created a steamroller that spread <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+1%3A+6&version=NIV">throughout the whole world</a>. It <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts%207:54-60">enraged local elites</a> and lead
to pogroms (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+8%3A+1-4&version=NIV">Acts 8: 1-4</a>), <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+11%3A+18&version=NIV">mass deportation</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+20%3A+22-24&version=NIV">pervasive persecution</a>.</p>
<h2>Early Christians were socialists</h2>
<p>Why put so much effort into assassination and suppression? The answer is that Jesus wasn’t just an anti-authoritarian, he was a socialist revolutionary leader. He told wealthy folks to <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+19%3A+16-23&version=NIV">redistribute their wealth</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+4%3A+32-37&version=NIV">his followers did the same</a>. </p>
<p>Jesus and the early Christians were about equality and freedom from the “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians+5:1&version=NIV">yoke of slavery</a>.” They <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=GALATIANS+3%3A28&version=NIV">dismissed political, ethnic and gender hierarchies</a> and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Acts+20%3A+32-35&version=NIV">said we should all <em>help</em> the weak</a>, not destroy them. </p>
<p>In 2 Corinthians 8: 13-15, the apostle Paul admonishes the Corinthians and tells them to “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Corinthians+8%3A+13-15&version=NIV">strive for equality” by redistributing their wealth</a>. In a passage prescient of Karl Marx’s famous quote: “<a href="http://www.politicalaffairs.net/you-might-be-a-marxist-if-you-believe-in-from-each-according-to-their-abilities-to-each-according-to-their-needs/">From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs</a>,” Paul reminds the Corinthians to share. “<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Corinthians+8%3A15&version=NIV">The one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little</a>.” </p>
<p>All of the above was rooted in Christ and his followers’ dismissal of authoritarian spirituality in favour of a radical “we are all God” cosmology. <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10%3A33&version=NIV">Jesus claimed to be God</a> but “so are you,” he said (<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+10%3A34&version=NIV">John 10:24</a>,<a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+6%3A19+&version=NIV">Corinthians 6:19</a> <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Colossians+3%3A11&version=NIV">Colossians 3:11</a>). </p>
<p>In other words: Don’t listen to authority. Don’t listen to tradition. Don’t follow their rules. Give your possessions away. Help the weak. Live in peace with all people. Redistribute wealth. I am God. You are God. We are God. </p>
<p>Why were my expectations so out of line with the actual story told in the Bible? </p>
<h2>The Church is a rich male collective</h2>
<p>The Catholic priests I listened to as a child didn’t talk about Jesus the revolutionary; they told me <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+11%3A45-54&version=NIV">the same “big lie” the elites in the Bible told</a>. They made me recite that same lie every Sunday. By the time I was 10, the Catholic Church had burned the lie deep into my mind. </p>
<p>If you believe the Church is a continuation of Christ’s teachings, this is confusing. </p>
<p>However, once you learn the Catholic Church is a collection of elite patriarchs brought into formal power by edicts and actions of the Roman Emperors Constantine and Theodosius, it begins to become clear. When you realize the Church is <a href="https://nationalpost.com/news/wealth-of-roman-catholic-church-impossible-to-calculate">one of the richest and most powerful male collectives in the world</a>, it comes into clear focus.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101958/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Mike Sosteric does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The real lessons of Jesus Christ as outlined in the Bible are socialist. But the Church, a veritable old boys club, doesn’t teach us that.Mike Sosteric, Associate Professor, Sociology, Athabasca UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1025312018-09-07T20:00:53Z2018-09-07T20:00:53ZGreen Bay Packers fans love that their team doesn’t have an owner – just don’t call it ‘communism’<p>I was recently walking with my parents through the newly constructed Titletown District in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a community development project across the street from Lambeau Field, where the Green Bay Packers play their home games. It features a local brewpub, a boutique hotel, free outdoor games like foosball and shuffleboard, and a large practice field, where kids can play football.</p>
<p>At one point, I heard my dad say, “I know who this is.” He had picked out the Packers’ president, Mark Murphy, hurriedly making his way through the swarming crowd of people. Murphy kindly paused to shake my father’s hand and then my mother’s and then my own.</p>
<p>As Murphy moved on, my dad’s next reaction was interesting to me as a political scientist. </p>
<p>“The Packers are the only team with a president instead of an owner,” he said, turning to me. “You know, with every other team in the NFL, all that money the team makes, that goes straight to the owner.” Proudly, he continued, “The Packers don’t have an owner. All that money goes back to the community, the fans. It builds stuff like this,” motioning toward Titletown.</p>
<p>On our ride home, with Packer talk behind us, my dad started to ask me about my job prospects. I’m training to be a political theorist in an oversaturated job market with <a href="https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/08/28/more-humanities-phds-are-awarded-job-openings-are-disappearing">an overabundance of Ph.D.s</a>, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/Are-You-in-a-BS-Job-In/243318">increasing university administration</a>, increasing reliance on – ahem, <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Great-Shame-of-Our/239148">exploitation of</a> – adjunct instructors, and what feels like an all-time low in the diminution of the value of the humanities.</p>
<p>My job prospects are not good. </p>
<p>Next he asked why I decided on <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Immanuel-Kant">Immanuel Kant</a>, the German philosopher, as my dissertation topic.</p>
<p>I explained that I had seriously considered Marx. But I didn’t choose him because I thought it would limit my job prospects further. </p>
<p>“Why?” My dad asked. </p>
<p>“Well, you know, because people often associate Marx with communism.” </p>
<p>“Communism – no, no, no,” he said. “I don’t want anything to do with communism. The very idea of it sickens me.”</p>
<p>In my head, I thought, “What an interesting cognitive dissonance.” Wasn’t the principle virtue of the Green Bay Packers based in a communist idea: collective ownership of the means of production? And because there is no owner, doesn’t that mean its proceeds go back into its community?</p>
<p>I’m not really interested in the degree to which the Packers are a communist organization. But I am interested in my father’s reaction to the word “communism,” and how this response conflicted with a real-world example of one of communism’s animating ideas. </p>
<p>He has not, to my knowledge, ever read Marx or any genuinely communist literature. But he has obviously adopted a negative attitude to the word.</p>
<p>Capitalist ideology seems to have launched a successful marketing campaign against communism. To be a communist, in my father’s mind, is to be against freedom. It is to want total control over the lives and fates of all individuals in society. It is to be a Stalinist. </p>
<p>What he fears isn’t communism; it’s totalitarianism. </p>
<p>I couldn’t bring myself to point this out. I couldn’t tell him, “Dad, everything you just said about the Packers – that’s communism.”</p>
<h2>A special situation</h2>
<p>On <a href="https://www.packers.com/community/shareholders">Aug. 18, 1923</a>, the Packers became the first and only publicly owned team, selling <a href="http://archive.jsonline.com/sports/packers/46741862.html/">$5,000 in shares</a> to improve the team’s struggling finances. </p>
<p>Owning stock in the Packers is not like owning <a href="https://blogs.wsj.com/totalreturn/2012/01/13/are-the-green-bay-packers-the-worst-stock-in-america/">other stock</a>, however. It pays no dividends. Although fans earn nothing financially by owning stock, this unique arrangement does ensure that profits don’t go into the pocket of one or a handful of owners. Profits go instead to <a href="https://www.si.com/nfl/green-bay-packers-shareholders-team-owners">Green Bay Packers, Inc</a>. What fans gain – and not just those who own shares – is the assurance that their team will not leave Green Bay, the smallest market of all major American professional sports leagues.</p>
<p>In 1997, fresh off a Super Bowl win, the franchise turned again to its fans as “investors.” The team offered more fans the opportunity to join existing shareholders by selling additional shares. For $200 they could “own stock” in the team. Well aware of the fact that being an owner in this instance offers no real financial stake in the team, <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/sportsmoney/2011/12/08/buying-a-piece-of-the-packers/#2891e82455bb">fans proudly purchased 120,000 shares</a>. </p>
<p>In 2012, the team again expanded its sale of stock, <a href="http://www.nfl.com/news/story/09000d5d825773c0/article/packers-broaden-stock-sale-offer-another-30000-shares">selling an additional 30,000 shares</a>. I remember my uncle excitedly showing me his share, framed and displayed prominently in his otherwise lightly adorned living room.</p>
<p>The Packers are not only unique in the NFL for being a fan-owned, nonprofit team, they are the only team the NFL will allow to be. The 1960 constitution of the NFL states, in what is known as the the <a href="https://www.nfl.com/static/content/public/static/html/careers/pdf/co_.pdf">Green Bay Rule</a>, that “charitable organizations and/or corporations not organized for profit and not now a member of the league may not hold membership in the National Football League.” <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/those-non-profit-packers">According to a member of the Packers’ board of directors</a>, the model in Green Bay “is truly a special, special situation.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235095/original/file-20180905-45172-1ae30s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235095/original/file-20180905-45172-1ae30s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235095/original/file-20180905-45172-1ae30s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235095/original/file-20180905-45172-1ae30s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=454&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235095/original/file-20180905-45172-1ae30s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235095/original/file-20180905-45172-1ae30s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235095/original/file-20180905-45172-1ae30s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=571&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Green Bay Packers stock certificates are distributed to all shareholders, with many fans framing them.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Obama-Packers-Football/cb03baa7bb41452ca4017dd2ad090a5c/22/0">AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Admittedly, the Packers organization still functions within capitalism. Although it lacks an owner, the team otherwise engages in all the same market-based exchanges as other teams. The Packers do show, however, how one communist principle might float within a capitalist sea. Without an owner, more people overall benefit. The team benefits first to be sure. But its interest happens to be the first interest of fans like my dad as well.</p>
<h2>Sensing and seeing exploitation</h2>
<p>My dad’s passion for the game is undeniable. My biased view is that it is unique, even among die-hards.</p>
<p>Otherwise, my dad is a rather typical Wisconsinite of his generation. He was born and raised in <a href="https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sheboygan,+WI/@43.7462263,-88.851258,8z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x88035fc1bb4a495f:0x32f8eceab418e29!8m2!3d43.7508284!4d-87.71453">Sheboygan</a>, where he still lives. </p>
<p>He grew up in an era when higher education was not the assumed post-graduation trajectory, so he became a laborer in a toilet seat factory. </p>
<p>I’m proud of him for that. I’m proud, particularly, because being a laborer is hard work. I know because I worked with him for two summers in college.</p>
<p>What makes it hard, for starters, is that the factory line always goes at the same pace. This means that if you have energy and would like to work quickly, you can’t. If you are feeling tired, sore or sluggish, you must keep up with the brisk, mechanical pace of the line. The job takes a physical toll. </p>
<p>I remember getting home from work one night and sitting down to watch a movie on the couch at 7:00 p.m. I woke up the next morning, still on the couch, leaving for work in the same clothes because I didn’t have time to change. I was 18. My dad has worked there 40 years and will continue to do so until he retires at 65.</p>
<p>As a laborer in a family-owned factory, my dad is well aware who profits when the company does: The family who owns it. Educated entirely on biographies of the American founders and iconic presidents, he has a surprising knack for seeing exploitation and inequality. I saw this in action when he went on about the benefits of the Packers not having an owner. </p>
<p>Like my father, my brother-in-law has a knack for seeing exploitation in action. In a recent diatribe, he railed against the popular view that professional athletes make too much money. <a href="https://www.theodysseyonline.com/pro-athletes-are-paid-excess">According to the argument</a>, athletes make extraordinary sums of money for playing a game, for doing something children do for free. That argument concludes that athletes ought to be paid less.</p>
<p>But my brother-in-law sees the big picture. Despite all the money they make, professional athletes are really making money for the owners – <a href="https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/packers-financials-show-that-nfl-made-billions-despite-national-anthem-controversy/">gobs of it</a>.</p>
<p>Even though professional athletes make insane salaries by comparison to my father and my brother-in-law, they make far less than the owners. And this despite the fact that the owners themselves don’t do anything except own the team. </p>
<p>Without using any of the vocabulary – with no reference to bourgeois and proletariat, to owners of the means of production, and even without using the term “exploitation” – my brother-in-law has rather accurately described one of Marx’s main critiques of capitalism: Labor is fundamentally exploitative. Those who create surplus value are not the ones who benefit from it.</p>
<p>It doesn’t take Marx, apparently, to see what’s wrong with the owner-laborer, bourgeois-proletariat relation.</p>
<h2>Refreshing an old idea with a new word?</h2>
<p>When I teach Marx to my students, I ask them what comes to mind when they hear the name “Marx.” One of the first words listed is “communism,” but another is “Russia” or “the Soviet Union.” </p>
<p>Once we’ve assembled a list of associations, we begin to investigate how they came about. </p>
<p>I tell them that if you go to the <a href="https://europeforvisitors.com/germany/leipzig/museum-runde-ecke.htm">Museum in the Round Corner</a>, a former German Democratic Republic government office in East Germany’s lovely Leipzig, you’ll find a photo of a rally. </p>
<p>In a massive stadium, thousands of citizens each hold up a unique placard. Collectively each picture forms one gigantic image that can be seen from above. Organized by the communist government, the image is a blown-up portrait of Karl Marx with the phrase “Wir ehren Marx” – “We honor Marx.” </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235099/original/file-20180905-45143-1kthk6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/235099/original/file-20180905-45143-1kthk6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235099/original/file-20180905-45143-1kthk6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235099/original/file-20180905-45143-1kthk6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235099/original/file-20180905-45143-1kthk6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235099/original/file-20180905-45143-1kthk6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/235099/original/file-20180905-45143-1kthk6f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=546&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Delegates meet in East Berlin to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the death of Karl Marx, whose visage is displayed on stage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-International-News-Germany-FES-/2b246c2942f2da11af9f0014c2589dfb/9/0">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This display is an example of how the U.S.S.R. worked to make it look like it operated on Marxist principles. But communists such as <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/world-revolution-1917-1936">C.L.R. James</a> did not view Russia under Stalin as a true communist government. Nor did other scholars, like <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/396931.The_Origins_of_Totalitarianism">Hannah Arendt</a>, who instead characterize Stalinist Russia as totalitarianism. It’s important to remember that Marx did not advocate totalitarian government. My Dad, however, associates communism with Stalinist Russia – and thus associates it with totalitarianism. </p>
<p>So much the worse for Marx. </p>
<p>If my father could dissect the vampirism of football franchise owners, if my brother-in-law could analyze the fundamentally exploitative structure of labor without him, is the biggest source of people’s attitudes toward communism the word itself?</p>
<p>If “communism” is too laden with historical failures and semantic difficulties, are “socialism” or “social democracy” better alternatives?</p>
<p>They, too, seem to register similar anxieties in society. </p>
<p>Although Bernie Sanders openly <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35364868">adopts the monikers</a>, “socialist” and “Democratic socialist” as a member of the Democratic Party – as do ascendant figures in the party like <a href="https://twitter.com/Ocasio2018?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor">Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez</a> – such politics continue to be <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/bernie-sanders-and-the-misery-of-socialism-1529959476">maligned</a>. </p>
<p>Attitudes are beginning to change. <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/240725/democrats-positive-socialism-capitalism.aspx">A recent Gallup poll</a> shows that 57 percent of democratic-leaning poll-takers view socialism favorably. A deeper look at the demographics is revealing, however. Although attitudes to socialism are becoming more favorable overall, it is quite clear that the working class of my father’s generation are among the slowest to come around. </p>
<p>Of my father’s age group – 50 to 64 – only 30 percent viewed it favorably. </p>
<p>Perhaps an entirely new word needs to be coined. Hell, why not call it Packerism? </p>
<p>If you want a political movement to work in Wisconsin, that’s what to call it. But of course, what might be a successful rebrand in Wisconsin is not likely to be successful across the country as a whole. </p>
<p>So if not by calling it Packerism, how can the left renew an old idea with a new word?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/102531/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alan J. Kellner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Many Americans seem to like seeing communist ideas in action, but have a visceral reaction to the word ‘communism.’ Might it be time to refresh an old ideology with a new set of terms?Alan J. Kellner, PhD Candidate in Political Science, Northwestern UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/991252018-08-13T10:25:44Z2018-08-13T10:25:44ZA socialist’s primary win doesn’t herald a workers revolution in the US<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231518/original/file-20180810-2921-o0yf3x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at a California fundraiser in August</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP/Jae C. Hong</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Anyone anticipating a golden dawn of Marxist-Leninist communism soon in the United States might have to wait a while longer – perhaps forever. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/26/politics/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-joe-crowley-new-york-14-primary/index.html">surprise victory of socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez</a> over longtime Democratic New York Congressman John Crowley in a New York congressional primary has been featured prominently in the news. That was soon followed by headlines proclaiming the radical wing of the Democratic Party wants to take it over.</p>
<p>Both are noteworthy for a number of reasons. But they do not herald a workers’ revolution in the United States.</p>
<p>Despite the surprise around Ocasio-Cortez’s victory, the <a href="https://www.dsausa.org/">Democratic Socialists of America</a>, or DSA, of which Ocasio-Cortez is a member, is not an upstart on the American political scene. Part of a long history of socialism in America, the Democratic Socialists have had relationships with progressive Democratic Party candidates and members of Congress for decades.</p>
<p>I have conducted <a href="https://repository.asu.edu/attachments/135145/content/Pout_asu_0010E_13635.pdf">research</a> in areas of the world once dominated by socialism. When I teach my <a href="https://isearch.asu.edu/profile/1245719">political ideologies class</a>, I point to the long history of socialism that has contained many and various voices.</p>
<p>Socialism, in the broadest sense, posits that since society’s wealth is created by its workers, its workers should benefit from the fruits of their labors and administer them as they please.</p>
<p>The DSA’s history of moderation and collaboration with the American establishment sets it apart in history against more radical and utopian socialist parties, both in the U.S. and the rest of the world.</p>
<h2>Socialism’s European history</h2>
<p>Socialism, conservatism and liberalism <a href="http://yoksis.bilkent.edu.tr/pdf/files/7963.pdf">constitute the three cardinal political ideologies</a>. </p>
<p>Socialist ideas grew in importance as thinkers criticized the liberalism that has dominated the West since <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/enlightenment">the Enlightenment</a> in the 18th century. </p>
<p>Socialism is often associated with <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Karl-Marx">Karl Marx</a>. For Marx, capitalism unjustly concentrated the wealth of the many in the hands of a few. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231519/original/file-20180810-2906-1ox2fzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231519/original/file-20180810-2906-1ox2fzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231519/original/file-20180810-2906-1ox2fzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231519/original/file-20180810-2906-1ox2fzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=760&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231519/original/file-20180810-2906-1ox2fzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231519/original/file-20180810-2906-1ox2fzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231519/original/file-20180810-2906-1ox2fzj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=955&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Karl Marx in 1875.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Marx and his intellectual collaborator, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Friedrich-Engels">Friedrich Engels</a>, saw the misery of factory workers in 19th-century England. They expected the lives of the working class to get ever worse. At some point, they believed, workers would recognize their misery and overthrow the governments in advanced capitalist countries. </p>
<p>Then, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Communist-Manifesto">Marx and Engels believed</a>, a dictatorship would rule temporarily while society was reorganized in the interests of the workers. Eventually, this workers’ state would wither away to leave self-governing, satisfied workers with plenty of leisure time to engage in fulfilling pursuits. Marx named this latter state “communism.” </p>
<p>But socialism is not just about Marx.</p>
<p>English martyr St. Thomas More is sometimes seen as the earliest <a href="http://www.thomasmorestudies.org/g-c1.html">socialist</a>. Socialism’s defining principle of equitable distribution of society’s goods appears in his 1516 work “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2130">Utopia</a>.”</p>
<p>One of More’s characters states, “As long as there is any property … I cannot think that a nation can be governed either justly or happily: not justly, because the best things will fall to the share of the worst men; nor happily, because all things will be divided among a few … the rest being left to be absolutely miserable.”</p>
<p>The misery and poverty of those without adequate resources is a central theme in socialist thought.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Owen">Robert Owen</a>, an early 19th-century British industrialist, <a href="http://robert-owen-museum.org.uk/Plight_of_the_Unemployed">wrote</a>, “The rapid accumulation of wealth created by the industry of the people … [is] in the hands of capitalists who created none of it, and who misused all they acquired.” </p>
<h2>Socialism comes to the United States</h2>
<p>While socialist ideology was developed in England, with the notable contribution of certain Germans, like Marx and Engels, it wasn’t long before the idea gained a following in the United States. Robert Owen himself brought socialist ideas to the U.S. in his experimental, utopian community of <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/travel/ct-trav-0629-new-harmony-indiana-20140627-22-story.html">New Harmony, Indiana</a>. </p>
<p><a href="https://debsfoundation.org/index.php/landing/debs-biography/political-activist/">Eugene V. Debs</a> is the political figure most associated with American socialism. </p>
<p>A railroad worker, <a href="https://www.dsausa.org/almost_a_century_ago_another_democratic_socialist_ran_for_president_of_the_united_states">Debs ran as the presidential candidate</a> for the Socialist Party of America five times from 1900 to 1920. Debs remains American socialism’s most successful candidate, receiving <a href="https://www.270towin.com/1912_Election/">6 percent of the popular vote in 1912</a>. </p>
<p>Debs held that workers in the United States were denied a <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1905/revunion.htm">fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work</a>. From the wealth that they create, said Debs, workers receive only about 17 percent. </p>
<p>Aligning himself with American workers links Debs, through Owen and More, to the fundamental tenet of socialism: a distribution of wealth that recognizes working people as the rightful owners of their product. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231521/original/file-20180810-2909-1jfwmle.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/231521/original/file-20180810-2909-1jfwmle.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231521/original/file-20180810-2909-1jfwmle.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231521/original/file-20180810-2909-1jfwmle.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231521/original/file-20180810-2909-1jfwmle.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231521/original/file-20180810-2909-1jfwmle.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/231521/original/file-20180810-2909-1jfwmle.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A poster from the 1912 Debs campaign.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Democratic Socialists of America</h2>
<p>The Socialist Party of America, came, as socialist parties often do, to <a href="https://www.socialistparty-usa.org/anniversaryjournal.pdf">a crisis in 1972</a>. </p>
<p>The Debs faction wanted to perpetuate his pacifist position and opposed the Vietnam War. The other faction, led by political activist and author <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/08/the-still-relevant-socialist/378331/">Michael Harrington</a>, supported the war as a means <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1468-0130.1996.tb00279.x">to check the Soviet Union</a>, whose human rights abuses and repressive authoritarian government were seen by some socialists as a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Harrington-American-activist-and-author#ref1189095">betrayal of their movement</a>. </p>
<p>Harrington also saw this as a way to distance himself from <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/democratic-socialists-used-to-be-decent-1531347159">the anti-Americanism many associated with socialism</a>. By 1973, Harrington had taken his faction out of the Socialist Party of America and formed the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Harrington-American-activist-and-author#ref1189095">Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee</a>. </p>
<p>From the beginning, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/03/25/the-coming-out-of-us-socialists/9b2bb679-2f37-4ac1-b5dc-cc8cd788685f/?utm_term=.a61813583540">committed to working with</a> the Democratic Party, labor, racial minorities and feminists. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/books/review/Isserman-t.html?_r=1">Harrington adopted a pragmatic brand of socialism</a> that he described as being “on the left of the possible.” It <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1979/03/25/the-coming-out-of-us-socialists/9b2bb679-2f37-4ac1-b5dc-cc8cd788685f/?utm_term=.a61813583540">opposed Soviet-like concepts</a> American socialists had once endorsed, such as centralization of the economy and public ownership of major enterprises.</p>
<p>The DSA was founded in 1982 <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/5/15930786/dsa-socialists-convention-national">by the merger of</a> Harrington’s DSOC with the smaller New American Movement, a socialist group that had grown out of the student groups of the 1960s. </p>
<h2>Socialism moves towards the center</h2>
<p>Some long-held DSA policies are hardly distinguishable from today’s mainstream politics. </p>
<p>On important matters of international affairs such as trade and terrorism, the DSA has historically and consistently remained in touch with general American attitudes. The DSA’s platform since 1982 has included a national health service <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/5/15930786/dsa-socialists-convention-national">and reining in the power</a> of multinational corporations. </p>
<p>Members of Congress, mayors and state legislators have been a part of the Democratic Socialists of America from its founding and throughout. By 1990, the DSA had 19 of its members in an elected office. That included two U.S. representatives – both from California – four state representatives and five mayors. This marginal success in elected office continues today as the party has <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2017/11/10/what_democratic_socialist_lee_carter_s_upset_win_suggests_about_the_left.html">35 elected officials</a> in its ranks.</p>
<p>While America’s most famous democratic socialist is <a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2015/aug/26/bernie-sanders-socialist-or-democratic-socialist/">Bernie Sanders</a>, the Vermont senator and 2016 presidential candidate has not identified himself as a DSA member.</p>
<p>Ocasio-Cortez, who won the New York primary against an established Democratic party figure, espoused campaign positions that were right off of the 1979 DSOC platform – and <a href="https://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2016/07/dnc_2016_10_big_ways_the_democratic_platform_diffe.html">recent Democratic Party positions</a>. Her message was “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/27/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-who-is-she-democrats-new-york-life-career-policies">economic, social, and racial dignity</a>.” She called for single-payer health care and attacked the influence of large corporations. </p>
<p>Given her win in a safe Democratic seat, it appears likely that Ocasio-Cortez will be the 36th member of the DSA currently holding elected office in the U.S., thus extending the long history of socialism in America.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/99125/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Pout has received funding from the Fulbright Porgram</span></em></p>The victory of a Democratic Socialist in a New York primary will not lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat. It’s an incremental addition to the long history of moderate socialism in the US.Daniel Pout, Instructor School of Politics & Global Studies, Arizona State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/974792018-06-05T13:37:37Z2018-06-05T13:37:37ZWhat Karl Marx has to say about today’s environmental problems<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221802/original/file-20180605-119867-19sxm3m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Green Marx.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/libertinus/9940279183/">Montecruz Foto/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>…all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility.</p>
<p>– Karl Marx, Capital vol 1</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and an economic shift in China it seemed that capitalism had become the only game in town. Karl Marx’s ideas could safely be relegated to the dustbin of history. However the global financial crash of 2008 and its aftermath sent many rushing back to the bin. </p>
<p>For good or ill, the German philosopher’s ideas have affected our world more profoundly than any other modern social or political thinker. Yet on Marx’s recent <a href="https://theconversation.com/karl-marx-wouldnt-agree-that-worker-power-has-been-killed-by-the-21st-century-95982">200th birthday</a>, discussion of his continuing relevance was still dominated by “traditional” understandings of Marxism. Commentators, whether hostile or sympathetic, focused on his critique of the exploitation and inequality of capitalism and imperialism, and the struggle to transform society in a socialist direction. </p>
<p>Sadly, there was little – far too little – on Marx’s thinking on the relations between humans and nature. </p>
<p>After all, the steady but accelerating destruction by modern capitalism of the very conditions which sustain all life, including human life, is arguably the most fundamental challenge facing humanity today. This is most widely recognised in the shape of one of its most devastating symptoms: climate change. But there is much more to it, including toxic pollution of the oceans, deforestation, soil degradation and, most dramatically, a loss of biodiversity on a geological scale.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221771/original/file-20180605-119870-sbl60r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221771/original/file-20180605-119870-sbl60r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221771/original/file-20180605-119870-sbl60r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221771/original/file-20180605-119870-sbl60r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221771/original/file-20180605-119870-sbl60r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221771/original/file-20180605-119870-sbl60r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221771/original/file-20180605-119870-sbl60r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221771/original/file-20180605-119870-sbl60r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘The history of nature and the history of men are dependent on each other so long as men exist’ – Karl Marx.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Stephen Bonk / shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some will say that these are new problems, so why should we expect Marx, writing more than a century ago, to have had anything worthwhile to offer to us today? In fact, <a href="http://environment-ecology.com/journals/411-capitalism-nature-socialism-a-journal-of-socialist-ecology.html">recent</a> <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/product/marxs_ecology/">scholarship</a> has demonstrated that the problematic, often contradictory relationship between humans and the rest of nature was a central theme in Marx’s thinking throughout his life. His ideas on this remain of great value – even indispensable – but his legacy is also quite problematic and new thinking is needed. </p>
<h2>Alienation – from nature</h2>
<p>Marx’s early <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Economic-Philosophic-Manuscripts-1844.pdf">philosophical manuscripts of 1844</a> are best known for developing his concept of “alienated labour” under capitalism, yet commentators hardly ever noticed that for Marx the fundamental source of alienation was our estrangement from nature.</p>
<p>This began with <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm">enclosure of common land</a>, which left many rural people with no means of meeting their needs other than to sell their labour power to the new industrial class. But Marx also talked of spiritual needs, and the loss of a whole way of life in which people found meaning from their relationship to nature.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221785/original/file-20180605-119860-6banma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221785/original/file-20180605-119860-6banma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221785/original/file-20180605-119860-6banma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221785/original/file-20180605-119860-6banma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221785/original/file-20180605-119860-6banma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221785/original/file-20180605-119860-6banma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221785/original/file-20180605-119860-6banma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221785/original/file-20180605-119860-6banma.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Enclosure turned common land into private property and, Marx argued, helped England move from feudalism to capitalism.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cristian Teichner / shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The theme running through his early manuscripts is a view of history in which exploitation of workers and of nature go hand-in-hand. For Marx, the future communist society will resolve the conflicts among humans and between humans and nature so that people can meet their needs in harmony with one another and <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm">with the rest of nature</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Man <em>lives</em> on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In these writings Marx makes vital contributions to our understanding of the human-nature relationship: he overcomes a long philosophical tradition of viewing humans as separate from and above the rest of nature, and he asserts the necessity for both survival and spiritual well-being of a proper, active relationship with the rest of nature. At the same time he recognises this relationship has gone wrong in the capitalist epoch.</p>
<h2>The problem is capitalism – not humanity</h2>
<p>In his later writings Marx develops this analysis with his key concept of “mode of production”. For Marx, each of the different forms of human society that have existed historically and across the globe has its own specific way of organising human labour to meet subsistence needs through work on and with nature, and its own specific way of distributing the results of that labour. For example, hunter-gatherer societies have usually been egalitarian and sustainable. However feudal or slave-owning societies involved deeply unequal and exploitative social relations, but lacked the limitlessly expansive and destructive dynamic of industrial capitalism. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221777/original/file-20180605-119860-1h7772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221777/original/file-20180605-119860-1h7772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221777/original/file-20180605-119860-1h7772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221777/original/file-20180605-119860-1h7772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221777/original/file-20180605-119860-1h7772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221777/original/file-20180605-119860-1h7772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221777/original/file-20180605-119860-1h7772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221777/original/file-20180605-119860-1h7772.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Marx talked of ‘primitive communism’ in ancient societies.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anton_Ivanov /Shutterstock</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This concept of “modes of production” immediately undermines any attempt to explain our ecological predicament in such abstract terms as “population”, “greed” or “human nature”. Each form of society has its own ecology. The ecological problems we face are those of capitalism – not human behaviour as such – and we need to understand how capitalism interacts with nature if we are to address them. </p>
<p>Marx himself made an important start on this. In the 1860s he wrote about <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/2013/12/01/marx-rift-universal-metabolism-nature/">soil degradation</a>, a big concern at the time. His work showed how the division of town and country led to loss of soil fertility while at the same time imposing a great burden of pollution and disease in the urban centres. </p>
<p>Modern writers have developed these ideas further, including the late <a href="http://libcom.org/library/capitalism-nature-socialism-theoretical-introduction-james-oconnor">James O’Connor</a>, the sociologist John Bellamy Foster, who identified an endemic tendency of capitalism to generate an “<a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Ecological_Rift.html?id=VGzJQgAACAAJ">ecological rift</a>” with nature, and those in the UK associated with the <a href="http://redgreenstudygroup.org.uk/rgsg-position-paper-2016/">Red Green Study Group</a>.</p>
<p>I suggested above that Marx’s ideas were indispensable but also problematic. There are places where he appears to celebrate the huge advances in productivity and control over the forces of nature achieved by capitalism, seeing socialism as necessary just to share the benefits of this to everyone. Recent scholarship has challenged this interpretation of Marx, but historically it has been very influential. It is arguable that the disastrous consequences of the Stalinist drive for rapid industrialisation in Russia came from that interpretation. </p>
<p>But there is another point. The newer ecological marxists argue, rightly, that capitalism is ecologically unsustainable, and that socialism is necessary to establish a rational relationship to the rest of nature. However, to build a movement capable of transforming society in this way, we need to recall Marx’s early emphasis on both the material <em>and spiritual</em> needs that can be met only by a fully rewarding and respectful relationship to the rest of nature: in short, we need a Marxism that is green, as well as ecological.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97479/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ted Benton received funding from ESRC. He is affiliated with Red-green Study Group and Green Party</span></em></p>Marx believed that exploitation of workers and of nature went hand-in-hand.Ted Benton, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.