normblog

Marx right and wrong

There's an interesting essay by Robert Paul Wolff on 'The Future of Socialism' [pdf]. Introduced with a wry, self-deprecating comment that casts doubt on how many people will take the topic seriously, it sets out what Wolff thinks Marx can still 'teach us about the world', as well as three failures on Marx's part to anticipate the direction in which capitalism would develop. What Marx can teach us Wolff develops from a famous sentence of Marx's from 1859, namely:

No social order disappears before all of the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed, and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material components of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.

As Wolff extrapolates this thought, the reason socialism has until now remained essentially premature, impossible to achieve, is that 'efficient techniques of central planning' were not yet available. But the further history of capitalism has begun to make them available. The following excerpt gives something of the flavour of Wolff's argument:

[W]hen Marx talks about socialism, he has in mind an economy whose stage of development of technology and organization is so far advanced that national planning is technically possible. Such a stage exhibits both a certain level of technology of production, of data generation and retrieval, and of communication, and also a corresponding level of knowledge and skill on the part of workers at every level, not merely at the top. Although Marx failed to foresee the digital computer, it is not farfetched to say that his conception of socialism presupposed it, or something equivalent.

Marx expected, for sound reasons, that the technology of production, communication, and management required for the central planning and control of an entire economy would develop first within capitalist firms, in direct response to the pressures of competition and the demands of profitability. And so they have. An immediate consequence of this process is the transformation of economic calculations into political decisions, within the firm. Thus, if by socialism we mean the rationally coordinated planning of an entire national economy in such a way as to transform the major economic choices of the society into political choices, responsive to the will of the people, then it is true that socialism has been growing within the womb of capitalism, or at least that the technical preconditions... of socialism can be seen to be developing there.
.....
What, then, is the fundamental difference between socialism and capitalism at its most advanced, rationalized, and centralized? Under socialism, economic decisions would be treated [I use the subjunctive because there does not yet exist a socialist society] as collective political decisions, to be made democratically on the basis of the aggregated will of the entire people. In a capitalist society, decisions are taken privately, within the firm, in response only to the interests, the will, or the pressures of those who occupy positions of power within the firm.

That there are these developing technical preconditions for socialism doesn't mean Wolff is optimistic about the current prospects of socialism. He isn't. This is because of what he takes to be Marx's three misdiagnoses of capitalism's future. First, Marx failed to anticipate the capacity of the capitalist state to manage economic crises. The second obstacle is 'the persistence of pre-capitalist passions and attachments that Marx was convinced capitalism's invasive rationalization of economic life would weaken and ultimately destroy - nationalist loyalties, ethnic identifications, racial antagonisms, and religious faiths'. Third, Marx foresaw a progressive homogenization of the labour force that could serve as the economic basis of political solidarity and dynamism; this has been undermined by the diversification of functions and rewards, so that now 'a fruitful solidarity [is] out of the question'. Wolff's conclusion is pessimistic:

If socialism is the achievement, at long last, of justice and equality, it is a dream that has been aborted in the womb of the old order.

The dream of justice and equality, however (and whatever their detailed description, whether this is a socialist description or not), cannot die. Just as, for their part, particularist identifications, 'non-rational' attachments, group animosities and localized hatreds, cannot be expected to. This was something else wrong with the Marxist vision: the idea of a linear chronology in which some (for all that we know) permanent aspects of the human condition are conceptualized as being pre-capitalist and therefore belonging to the past. In any case, the sketching of possibilities and analysis of the preconditions of progress remain a necessary exercise in pursuit of the dream of justice, as of the task of restraining injustice as best we can, the tendencies to conflict, wrong-doing, exploitation and unfreedom.

Hurt liberal

Inside some liberals there's a Stalinist trying to get out. This includes liberals who are also artistic people. I introduce to you one Carla Seaquist. A playwright, no less, she has taken the same road as normblog-regular Slavoj Žižek, only more so, in pronouncing The Hurt Locker to be politically in sin.

'How can artists, especially ones who call themselves serious, not take a political point-of-view of a war that, unlike a "good" war like World War II, is a seriously "bad" one...?' That is Ms Seaquist's opening question; and if you read the rest of what she has to say, you will find that modern history divides into good wars and bad wars and there is an obligation upon artists such that, 'For an artist to take an "apolitical" stance in relation to [a bad war], a war that tramples all over the moral line, is to surrender the title "artist."'

Seaquist construes the main protagonist's love of danger in the The Hurt Locker as rendering the movie 'pro-war', a piece of crassness I will merely note and leave behind. (As if the director must be commending to her audience the pyschological attitudes which she portrays in the fictional character.) What is more worthy of note is Seaquist's confidence that wars can all be neatly categorized as either good or bad wars. She has evidently not come across wars that were more problematic than that, that caused controversy because of an element of moral complexity. The Falkland War, the first Gulf War, even the last Iraq war itself? And she has evidently never had to reflect on the fact that even the very goodest of good wars had some content - yes, I mean on the side of the good - that was morally dubious, to put it no more strongly than that. Seaquist might like to do herself the favour of reading W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction. World War II was certainly a good war in my book, but the incineration of hundreds of thousands of German civilians, like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ought to give pause to anyone who thinks that artists must be bound by the simple dichotomous taxonomy with which our playwright operates.

Worst of all, beyond this simple-mindedness, is the bland assumption that she and her artistic mates, whoever they are, may lay down some obligatory line fixing the acceptable boundaries of proper art and excluding as beyond these boundaries anyone who does not propagate the 'correct' view about today's unfavourite war. The little inner Stalinist of the big bold liberal.

Wowsers, browsers

An introduction to the topic for those who might need it.

Must and should

Why do people say 'must' when they mean no more than 'should' (as in 'The government must act to etc', 'The England selectors must drop Ian Bell', 'You must write to thank her')? 'Must' carries more force than 'should' through sometimes connoting genuine compulsion. The compulsion can be of different kinds. 'These policies must fail' is a prediction that, the world being as it is, these are policies that cannot be successful, so that the 'must' expresses an inevitability. Or 'must' can imply that the speaker is in a position vis-à-vis the spoken to enabling the former to demand something from the latter and compel him if he declines to comply voluntarily. Thus, 'You must vacate the property or else face legal action'.

So, to rephrase my original question: why do people say 'must' when the circumstances of the utterance clearly indicate that the 'must' has no compulsion behind it, neither the compulsion of some (putative) causal inevitability nor the compulsion of assumed or real authority? Perhaps just to add rhetorical force to what they say. But if that's all, then 'should' will serve equally well. No one is going to think, 'Cripes, she said "must", so we must.' Or perhaps 'must' is supposed to carry an implicit 'or else'. But there's always an implicit 'or else', even with moral judgements expressed only by 'should' or 'ought to'. Therefore I say: say 'should' in preference to 'must' unless your 'must' really means business.

But I must get on.

To be read

How many books does it make sense to accumulate on your 'to be read' shelf if you have one, or in your 'to be read' stock if you don't? The question is prompted by Lucy's excess-of-books post over here. Lucy doesn't say how many of her 10,000 [!] books fall into the TBR category but it sounds like there might be quite a few more than the shelf-worth that I allow myself. I don't mean I only have one shelf of not-yet-read books. I have far, far more than that. But many of these unread books are ones I once bought with the intention of reading and things have moved on, some were bought just to have, or with the vague idea that I might one day read them; and so on. My TBR shelf, as named, holds the books I mean to read soon, and I don't permit myself to acquire any more in the same category until a gap opens up that can accommodate them. My TBR books have evolved from being part of one shelf to being the entire shelf, but I will NOT let them grow any further. When I told a friend not long ago that I had 50-plus books queued for reading, she looked at me as if I was caught up by a spirit of excess indeed. Half a dozen, OK; but a whole shelf! Is there any rationality, though, in this matter?

Not clever enough

Is three instances enough to constitute a trend? First we had Peter Preston yearning for a prophet and true believer to make the case about climate change. Then there was George Monbiot saying a prophet wouldn't be enough, and giving reasons why persuasion was unlikely to work. And now it's James Lovelock offering the hypothesis that humans aren't 'yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a[s] complex a situation as climate change'.

This reminds me of a meeting I attended some time in the 1970s, at which leading figures in the far-left organization to which I then belonged were trying to win over members to vote for the 'political tendency' for which they were speaking. Vexed by something said to him from the floor, one speaker denounced the partisans of the main opposing tendency as being 'a petty-bourgeois rabble'. He failed to win anyone with this observation.

It is not a matter for scandal that Lovelock should doubt the collective intelligence of the human species as thus far evolved. If this is his hypothesis, then so be it; he is free to articulate it. However, he cannot know for sure that our intelligence such as it is, and the force of relevant evidence, and the skills of persuasive advocacy, won't in due course prevail over opposing impulses. So it might be a better idea not to insult the intelligence of his potential audience, but rather to appeal to it. Unless, thinking that it 'may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while', he's already given up on democracy in this matter for the time being. Is that now a trend within the argument for climate change?

One dog barking

Two reports: fears that the economic crisis might lead to increasing anti-Semitism in the US have not been realized, with some speculations about why this is; and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has noted the responsibility of the Venezuelan government for 'creating an atmosphere of intimidation and violence against the Jewish community in Venezuela'. (Thanks MK for the second link.)

No general cause of terrorism

The Guardian has an eccentric concept of causation. It's one that it leaves unexplained in its leader today about the bombings on the Moscow Metro. Condemning these as barbaric and intolerable, the paper goes on to claim that 'Most terrorism has local not global roots'. Oh really?

We are to infer, then, that ideologies according to which blowing up commuters on the subway - or air passengers, revellers in bars, people on buses etc; in general, people at random - is justified have no causal influence in the production of events like this latest atrocity. It would be nice to see an account of causality that might justify such disregard for the effect that ideas can have on people's actions; however true it may also be that their actions can be influenced by localized grievances or other non-general causes. No such account would be credible, though. Why should the leader-writer(s) at the Guardian have an impulse to overlook or minimize the existence of a set of ideas that is of plainly global influence today, purporting to legitimize the likes of what just happened in Moscow, and before that in London and Madrid (to speak only of them)? I suppose because it doesn't sit comfortably with other Guardian viewpoints to fully acknowledge the existence and influence of these murderous ideas for the autonomous causal factor that they are. The paper needs to adjust its other viewpoints to fit in with reality. When it editorializes about torture, it leaves out that sort of claptrap, seemingly at ease with the insight that torture is a general problem that is produced at least in part by bad ideas about human rights and noxious security policies. Why the imbalance?

A lovesome thing, God wot

With some things you read in the press you agree, with others not. Some you find more interesting, others less, and yet others totally dull. There are pieces you feel a need to read with care and pieces you're content to skim. But unless it's something deeply scientific or highly technical, plain understanding isn't often a problem in reading a newspaper. Yesterday, however, I came across a column in the Irish Times by which I was flummoxed. It took me a while to get beyond the opening sentence:

It is a terrible thing when you lose faith in gardening.

What? That must surely be the wrong g-word, was my first thought. Gardening? OK, I'm familiar with the words of the immortal Jane: 'One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other'. Though I have no love of gardening, in fact an antipathy for it, I do not deny the possibility of its giving pleasure to others. But a terrible thing, and to lose faith? Some overstatement, surely.

But there's more in the same vein.

It is particularly terrible to lose faith in gardening in these troubled times, when more than 90 per cent of the Irish middle class remain attached, both intellectually and emotionally, to a horticultural orthodoxy that foreign observers find extraordinary.

If you think this 90 per cent statistic surprising stick around, because it has a twin following close behind:

In this matter the Irish middle class exhibits a striking uniformity of belief. In a recent survey, nine out of 10 of them stated that they would prefer their children to marry gardeners.

Readers, I promise you, my tolerance for the different tastes of others is enormous. As I have said more than once before, I am untroubled by the fact that there are fans of the singing of Mary Chapin Carpenter. But nine out of 10 middle class Irish people wanting their children to marry gardeners is astonishing even once you realize that that doesn't necessarily mean professional gardeners.

How have I managed to miss this level of insanity amongst Irish people that I know? Liking, even loving, gardening I can understand, though I do not share it. But having faith in it to the tune of 90 per cent and preferring your children to marry into the faith? Isn't it like wanting your children to marry collectors of cricket books? Complete failure of comprehension... 'How do you carry on when you know that, contrary to all the lies peddled in the newspapers, on the radio and on television, that you can go wrong with potatoes?... It is hard to try again once you have been visited by carrot fly... The scandal of compost alone is horribly under-reported.' A colleague once suggested to me that my... er, indifference to gardening wasn't entirely uncommon amongst Jews. Maybe so. But, whether for that reason or for some other, I'm struggling with this one.

Writer's choice 252: Jenny Haddon

Jenny Haddon was a writer from four years old. She read English at St Hugh's College, Oxford, failed to get her first novel published and went to work at the Bank of England, where she learned to check everything at least 10 times and beware high flying economists. Mostly she is published as Sophie Weston, and her most recent story, 'Cinderella, Revised', is in the new collection Loves Me, Loves Me Not, edited by Katie Fforde and Sue Moorcroft. Always interested in style - well, P.G. Wodehouse is her hero – she has co-written Getting the Point, A User-Friendly Guide to Punctuation for Adults with historical novelist Elizabeth Hawksley. Jenny is currently working on a different sort of novel and, with Diane Pearson, is compiling a celebration volume of the Romantic Novelists' Association's first 50 years. Here she discusses P.G. Wodehouse's Hot Water.

Jenny Haddon on Hot Water by P.G. Wodehouse

When I was young there were three ways of discovering authors, rather like boyfriends: polite introduction by one's elders; adventuring in the fleshpots, generally with a specific warning against; and chance. And it was by chance, all on my own, that I found Wodehouse, when I picked up a book in my local library. I read a page and, with an almost audible click, I was home.

No one I knew agreed with me. My father, a sweet-hearted socialist of the old school, was uncomfortable with PGW's upper-class twits. My mother said simply that she didn't like funny books. Teachers and contemporaries alike dismissed him. For this, Sean O'Casey's assessment - 'English literature's performing flea' - must bear some responsibility. To be fair to O'Casey, he wrote this in a letter to The Daily Telegraph in 1941, when the British press was calling Wodehouse every sort of fascist traitor, so the judgement has to be at least as political as it was literary. But then, I suspect, for O'Casey there was not a big difference.

Yet, in spite of the general sniffiness, I began to realize that Wodehouse was more than a spot of trivial self-indulgence. He bore re-reading exceptionally well. I could remember the best bits word for word, more readily than anything except Shakespeare. He gave me a new and delightful, if slightly weird, perspective on other people's activities. In fact, he was a source of profound pleasure, up there with Bach and Mozart.

Can I explain it? Well, no, not entirely. But it was more than the simple pleasure of taking a holiday in an eternal Edwardian summer of Grand Country Houses and barmy aristocrats. In fact, I disagree with the regular characterization of Wodehouse's dramatis personae as amiable eccentrics. (Bertie Wooster is a kind man but his slightest gesture towards eccentricity is squashed by Jeeves - one remembers, with regret, the skirmish over the white mess jacket. Lord Emsworth is only intermittently amiable. With the exception of the occasional chorus girl, all PGW's women are tough cookies who could give today's feminists a correspondence course in man management.) The amiability is the author's and it is the amiability of the measured Augustan, who sees life steadily, sees it whole and gets a jolly good laugh out of it. The eccentricity exists only in the characters' lack of self-consciousness. These are not people-pleasers. Still less are they analysts of their own desires. They do what they want to do. Sometimes that is daft. Sometimes it is hopelessly pretentious. Occasionally it is criminal. They may dissemble in pursuit of a stratagem - and a great source of delight and plot complication it is - but essentially they don't lie. They are as wilful and inventive as adolescents. Courteous and friendly adolescents, on the whole, but adolescents nevertheless. Their plans zip straight from the subconscious to the boat train, with minimal messing about.

And of course, there is the joy of the Wodehouse style. No words of mine can do it justice. It is worth remembering that the other great 20th century stylist of popular fiction, Raymond Chandler, arrived at Dulwich College the autumn term after Wodehouse left. Maybe they found their way independently to their mastery of balance, structure, clarity and timing. Maybe it was the inspiration of the flamboyant headmaster, A.H. Gilkes, himself a novelist. But my money is on a classics master, who will have taught them rhetoric, which they both used to such effect. (I hold that nobody since Pope has used the Mock Heroic, and its attendant Bathos, to such effect as Wodehouse.) Robert McCrum, in his masterly biography of PGW, refers to the Librarian, Philip Hope, of whose exhilarating lessons one of his students remembered: 'Few could have rivaled him in teaching boys to compose prose and verse, and we were often spell-bound by the speed and brilliance with which he gave version after version of the ways in which a sentence or line could be turned into Greek or Latin.' [Robert McCrum, Wodehouse, A Life, pp. 30-31.] Aha, I thought, when I read it. That'll be the chap.

I came to Hot Water late and, again, by chance, this time in a second-hand bookshop. My copy is one of the old Herbert Jenkins orange cloth-bound jobs - 'fourth printing, completing 51,007 copies', so sales were pretty good, in spite of a lukewarm reception by the critics. Even J.B. Priestley said it was 'the mixture as before', adding as a sop, which can have been small comfort to PGW, 'and very diverting it is, too'. (I wish I could have told PGW that once, when struggling in the net of a vile depression, I read it from cover to cover and decided that life wasn't so bad after all and flushed the tablets down the loo.) It is dedicated to Maureen O'Sullivan (yes, that Maureen O'Sullivan; he was working in Hollywood and they shared a passion for Pekes) and was written after he had got into a fairish-sized bath of hot water himself, making fun of the studio who employed him to the LA press. It effectively ended his career in movies.

But Hot Water is not about Hollywood. (Read the Mr Mulliner stories for that. You are in for a treat.) Nor is it part of either the Blandings or Wooster canon. It is set mainly on the French Riviera, has the neatly convoluted plot of a French farce and is pure heaven. PGW, a cautious man when it came to evaluating his own work, thought it, 'A corker. There isn't an incident in it that doesn't act as a delayed bomb and lead to an explosion later.' He was not wrong.

This is farce that nods to Molière. Characters do not know themselves (or their nearest and dearest) and have to learn. But these are not eccentrics. Take out the wondrous authorial voice, and you have people who could turn up in any number of novels - political thrillers, high and low romances, gumshoe crime and Literature with the proverbial capital. (It was written in 1932. Two years later, Fitzgerald published Tender is the Night - same period, same landscape, same floundering American expats; even, God help us, the same level of inebriation.) No, it is not this particular bunch of characters which is eccentric. It is us. The novel's message is that we are all barmy when we get the bit between our teeth. It simply takes the Author of Sense and Sentiment to reveal it to us.

And how gently, how deliciously, how sympathetically he does it. Hot Water starts with a tubby little man, forcibly transplanted to the South of France by his wealthy wife, reading post from home on the terrace of a Riviera chateau. 'Ever since his marriage two years ago and the subsequent exodus to Europe he had been pining wistfully for California. The poet speaks of a man whose heart was in the Highlands, a-chasing of the deer. Mr Gedge's heart was in Glendale, Cal., wandering around among the hot dogs and filling stations.' This is farce made upon the stuff of tragedy. (I sometimes imagine what Fitzgerald would have made of J. Wellington Gedge and his power-broking wife. Probably the poor sap would have ended up as Ambassador to France, wearing knickerbockers, after all, while Mrs Gedge ran a salon of whiskered blokes and waged war against Gertrude Stein.)

Sometimes the Author of Sense and Sentiment stands back and simply observes. Waterloo Station, for instance, resembles 'a cathedral whose acolytes fill in their time with a bit of steam-fitting on the side'. Similarly, 'An education at Eton and subsequent travel in both Great Britain and the United States had given the Vicomte de Blissac a considerable fluency in the English tongue but not a perfect command of it. He belonged to the school of thought which holds that if you talk quick the words will take care of themselves.'

Sometimes the author is right behind the shoulder of one of his characters, letting us tune into their inner monologue. Take the disdainful beauty Lady Beatrice Bracken, bidding a temporary farewell to her fiancé, Patrick B. Franklyn, 'the well known young American millionaire and sportsman', when they bump into his old friend, that cheerful reveller the Vicomte under reference. 'It was not often that Lady Beatrice Bracken did approve of Packy's friends. It seemed to her that each was more repulsive than the last. She herself, except for a taste for the society of intellectuals, was exclusively County in her intimacies. Packy, on the other hand, as far as she had been able to gather, seemed to like everybody.' Aha, says the alert reader. This is a woman who needs to become an ex-fiancée and pretty sharpish. Packy, of course, liking everybody as he does, is unaware of it. So here is the book's romantic conflict, without which no Wodehouse novel is complete: chap goes for wrong girl and has to find out the hard way.

I cannot tell you any more of the plot. You need to see it unfold for yourself, each little slow-release bomblet fizzing away at the back of your mind, while the characters plan and persuade and push and sometimes think they're getting somewhere, only to fall spectacularly on their butts – well, this is farce, after all. All I can say is that, as it unfolds, it all seems perfectly natural. Heck, it is what the reader would do himself, as the logical next step. (As I said, we are all 'eccentrics'.) Only logic is not reliable. Hot Water is an Ode in Praise of Cock-up Theory.

There are scenes to treasure. I commend to you two Americans pretending to be French aristocrats, compelled to speak French. Put your coffee cup down when you get to that one. I commend to you the inventive, resourceful, open-hearted hero, the lively heroine, her Prohibitionist Senator father (a ten-minute egg, if ever there was one), her fiancé, the younger British novelist who earns his bread doing noises off at the BBC - 'Somebody says "Hurrah, girls, here comes the Royal Bodyguard" and Blair goes tramp, tramp, tramp! - the Pinkerton's agent, the safe blower... oh every single one, a delight. I commend to you an approach to fiction in which the good end happily and the bad end seeing the error of their ways.

Above all, I commend to you the sheer delight of a style which is perfectly honed, as spare and expressive as poetry, as clear as chemical analysis and as friendly as a Labrador. Enjoy!

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