Is Marx more diminished than enhanced by Terry Eagleton’s defence of him?This article titled “Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review” was written by Tristram Hunt, for The Observer on Sunday 29th May 2011 01.30 UTCAs the IMF dishes out its medicine in Lisbon, Dublin and Athens, and the limitations of neo-liberalism become more apparent, the moment is surely right for a compelling account of Karl Marx’s relevance to the modern world. And in campus conferences, continuing sales of Das Kapital, and even the words of Pope Benedict XVI (moved to praise Marx’s “great analytical skill”), there is a growing appreciation for Marx’s predictions of globalisation, rampant capitalism, and the instability of international finance. As the Times put in the middle of the 2008 crash: “He’s back!”But Marx also remains the target of any number of lazy slurs. The easiest way to kill off debate about Marxism is to jump straight to the Stalin show-trials, Soviet gulags, and Khmer Rouge Year Zero. The philosophical beliefs of a mid-19th-century denizen of the British Museum are all too quickly elided with the most terrible atrocities of the 20th century as an all-purpose intellectual get-out card.So Terry Eagleton – literary critic, liberal-baiter, Marxist man of letters – has set himself the task of explaining why Marx was right. “What if all the most familiar objections to Marx’s works are mistaken?” he begins. His plan is to take on “10 of the most standard criticisms of Marx and try to refute them one by one”. He does so, he believes, at a time when capitalism is uniquely in crisis: “the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon it is”. Or as Friedrich Engels used to put it: “This time there’ll be a dies irae such as has never been seen before… all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree.”But for any admirer of Eagleton or Marx, the book is a disappointment. There is none of the logical precision, winning prose or intellectual ambition displayed most recently in Eagleton’s Yale lectures on faith. Part of the problem is the structure. This is a work of intellectual rebuttal, as chapter by chapter Eagleton takes on a century of misreading Marx. All of which means he is fighting on an enemy territory of dreary objections. For example, there’s a long attempt to justify the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the Leninist aftermath, as well as the East German system of childcare – not something, I imagine, Marx and Engels themselves would have bothered with.The consequence of such deviations is that there is little sense of the anger, brio and bravado of Marx and Engels; none of the humour, irony and creativity so central to the Marxian heritage. Instead, this book reads like a rapidly crammed set of notes for an American midwest college course. There’s an array of lecture-hall style jokes and fairly worthless hyperbole. In no credible sense do one in three children in Britain today “live below the breadline”.Thankfully, amid the banalities, there lurk some wonderful passages. Eagleton is right to stress the centrality of democracy to Marxian communism, as well as explain so successfully the nature of free will within Marx and Engels’s account of history. This is all very much the humanist, Paris Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.Eagleton also stresses the modernity of Marx’s thinking and how, for example, he saw the nature of social class shifting with the progress of capitalism. “As long ago as the mid-19th century, he is to be found writing of the ‘constantly growing number of the middle-classes’ … men and women ‘situated midway between the workers on the one side and the capitalists on the other.’” This is a long way from the hackneyed dichotomy of proletarian and bourgeois.There is also a touch of the old Eagleton when he deploys Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure to explore the interaction of culture and materialism. When it comes to Jude Fawley, we need to appreciate that “Oxford University is the ‘superstructure’ to Jericho’s ‘base’.”However, Eagleton’s touch is less sure when it comes to the human condition under communism. In trying to rebut claims of utopianism, he goes too far in suggesting that “Marxism holds out no promise of human perfection” and “envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist”. Engels, though, was clear that the ascent from socialism to communism entailed a metaphysical change. Under the leadership of the proletariat, humanity achieves true freedom liberated from its animal instincts: “It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”Here was the quasi-theological endpoint of Marxism and it would have been more rewarding if Eagleton, such an intriguing catholic thinker, had expanded upon the Judaeo-Christian assumptions underpinning much of Marx’s heaven on earth. But perhaps that was too close to the bone.In the end, this is another worthy volume in the rarely scintillating Marx-Engels interpretative canon. Useful for undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame, but not for anyone else interested in the drama, insights, and majesty of Marxism. Marx might well have been right about an awful lot, but sadly Eagleton fails to make you care very much. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhy Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – reviewRelated posts:Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of powerThe Wizard of Oz – reviewThe latest word on globalisation
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Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/29/why-marx-was-right-by-terry-eagleton-%E2%80%93-review
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May 29 2011, 11:40am | Comments »
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A misplaced May Day dream for the masses
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/04/29/a-misplaced-may-day-dream-for-the-masses
May Day by John Sommerfield describes a society on the edge. The parallels with today are obvious – but it’s the differences that make it worth reading.
This article titled “A misplaced May Day dream for the masses” was written by Sam Jordison, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 29th April 2011 14.15 UTC It might have associations with people in funny clothes performing arcane rites and with Oxford students getting smashed off their gourds, but most us don’t think about Tories when we think about May Day. As several union leaders have already pointed out, the party’s current desire to replace May Day with Trafalgar Day (supposedly to “lengthen the holiday season”) is not practical so much as ideological. May Day might feel like a natural part of the calendar – but it has only been marked by a bank holiday since 1978, introduced by a Labour government to mark international workers’ day. And that, of course, is why the rightwingers don’t like it. They’d like it even less if they picked up the book that I’ve just been reading: May Day by John Sommerfield. This was written in 1936, but has just been reissued, with excellent timing, by London Books. It describes a society on the edge. The rich are getting richer and the poor are paying for it. The authorities clamp down on protest with the cynical use of force. Someone on a march is killed in an “accident”. The success of a march leads someone to comment: “I don’t think there’ll be so much damned squeamish argument against arming the police.” The parallels with our current troubles are obvious – but it’s the differences that make May Day worth reading. Sommerfield describes a few days in the lives of dozens of different characters across London, showing them at work, at play, down the pub, in bed, making love, feeling regret the day after, giving birth, dying, plotting to overthrow the bosses, plotting to undermine the workers. It’s a broad, ambitious sweep, but it’s all heading in the same direction: the inevitability of a general strike and the exultant victory of the Communist point of view. By the time Sommerfield was writing, Stalin had embarked on one of the biggest murder sprees in human history, but Sommerfield pants for Soviet Britain. So much so that he frequently loses all restraint:
“Then into this sudden pool of quiet splintered an alien voice, a hoarse shout of ‘Workers, all out on May Day. Demonstrate for a free Soviet Britain!’ … This rang in a million ears. Eyes remembered the chalked slogans on walls and pavements. The slogans, the rain of leaflets, the shouts and songs of demonstrators echoed in a million minds.” He also gushes:
“The printing presses were spinning themselves dizzy. There had never been so many leaflets before. They fell like rain, they were scattered like machine gun bullets.” Sommerfield loved his leaflets. He was also absolute in his convictions. For him there are two races in the world – rich and poor and that is where all conflict will lie. “Soon a lot more people will be having to take sides,” he wrote. They did indeed – but not in the way he thought. They would be fighting against fascism, not for “Soviet Britain”. There are plenty of things to be said in the book’s favour, particularly in the ambitious way he looks into so many lives around London, explores their living conditions, and lays bare their pleasures and pains. There’s also plenty more to be said against his writing which veers from the ridiculous to the not-too-bad and never really gets close to the sublime. Yet it’s as an attempt at social realism that it is most fascinating – and most flawed. In 1984 Sommerfield wrote a new forward for the book acknowledging how few favours time had done for his “1930s Communist romanticism”, but also said he hoped the book could be read as “an historical novel – worth reading, now, I hope, in relation to our own times.” To an extent it can. But I read it more as a reflection on a lost past and an exercise in folly. Possibly, it is harsh to judge Sommerfield’s May Day, for getting things so spectacularly wrong. It’s a novel, after all. It deals in fiction, not fact. But then again, while I was reading May Day, I couldn’t help thinking of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novella with the same title. It’s just one mark of Fitzgerald’s genius that his reflections on the day – although written in 1920 – still apply. The protests he describes seem hopeless, futile, distorted by absurd mobs on both sides: “all crowds have to howl”. The rich are oblivious at best, unforgiving and condescending the rest of the time. The tragedies he depicts are universal – but also painfully personal. His lead, Gordon Sterett, is a penniless, struggling artist who has never found his feet since returning from the First World War, but who has found booze and bad company. He is drowning in the tide of history, but his problems are more individual than any Sommerfield manages to describe. He is more real. So too is the world around him. The clothes are smarter, the dancing is more formal and the drinks sound more exotic. No one has a smart phone and radicals print their views on paper. Otherwise, Fitzgerald could be writing about today – or forever. His despair and defeat for the small man rings far more true than Sommerfield’s misplaced dream for the masses. May Day is a crushed dream. It makes the Tory vendetta against the holiday seem even more than usually petty.
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April 29 2011, 9:47am | Comments »
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Never has London’s atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme
Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London feels different to anywhere outside. By London, though, we are only talking about a small area of central, west and north london. Out in the banlieu, you might as well be in Bradford.
This article titled “Never has London’s atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme” was written by Ian Jack, for The Guardian on Saturday 16th April 2011 07.30 UTC In Bradford on a winter’s night 25 years ago, I stood in front of an estate agent’s window and made a calculation. For the price of our terrace house in north London – two up and two down and a bit of garden at the back – I could buy 10 similar houses in Bradford. This month I read that Burnley has the lowest property prices in England, and made another calculation. For the price of our London house I could buy 40 houses in Burnley that were averagely cheap and 80 of the very cheapest. This doesn’t mean that the differential in house prices between London and northern England has grown by more than 400% since 1986. I live in a bigger house now, and Burnley isn’t Bradford. But the gap is certainly widening: according to Halifax figures, houses in Newcastle-on-Tyne cost on average 28.8% less than they did in 2007, while in Islington they’ve risen 9.7% in the past year after changing very little – up or down – in the previous two. I look at pictures of the cheap houses in Burnley. They’re Victorian terraces. Their doors open straight on to the street, but they look solidly built from Pennine stone, no frills, but handsome. I imagine workers came home to them from cotton mills. Our house is certainly more imposing, three floors rather than two, with bow windows and ornamental red brick. But it has shallow foundations in London clay, so whether it’s sturdier is doubtful. I imagine someone who earned money in a suit, a senior clerk or a shopkeeper, first moved in when the terrace was completed in 1890. Without substantial inherited wealth, not even two-income families in the modern equivalent of those jobs could move in now. Newspapers sometimes write that the coalition cabinet contains “18 millionaires” as though it were a peculiar outrage, but everybody who’s paid off their mortgage in my street is a millionaire, if property is counted among their assets. And I stress that this is an ordinary street; until 30 or 40 years ago, a schoolteacher or a Fleet Street sub-editor could have afforded a house here. What explains my good fortune? To some extent many of my generation share it, especially if they worked in a trade or profession that blossomed in the 1980s (better, on the whole, to have been a national-newspaper journalist than a mechanical engineer). Most people I know have grander homes than their parents, no matter where they live in the United Kingdom. If they live in favoured parts of cities such as Edinburgh and Leeds, their homes are often enviable for their architecture and space. Only the very grandest of them, however, could be swapped for 40 cheap houses in Burnley. Above every other consideration – career, age – the combination of judgement and happenstance that made me a London house-owner is what explains my relative wealth. To a certain degree, this is an old story, and common to every metropolis. Moving to London four decades ago, I discovered one-bedroom flats were double the price of those I’d left behind in Glasgow. But then the 1980s arrived and the British economy’s centre of gravity shifted sharply (and to date, permanently) south. Between 1979 and 1986, jobs in manufacturing industry declined by almost two million; 94% of jobs lost in every sector in those years were north of a line drawn between the Wash and the Bristol Channel. The traditional idea of Britain – one taught in school geography books – was a country that made its money in the midlands and the north (including Scotland, and not forgetting Wales) and spent the profits mainly in the south. But now both the generation and consumption of wealth grew concentrated in the same place, and the north-south divide suddenly marked something more fundamental than dialects and traditions. It was during this time, soon after the miners’ strike, that I stood with a notebook in a Bradford street and worked out the house price ratio. I wondered then if it could last. It didn’t seem possible that it could get worse – and for several years around the turn of the century it didn’t. Public spending financed by European grants and taxes raised in the City of London secured for many northern towns at least the suggestion of a viable future, if viability is measured in warehouse conversions, art galleries, warm cappuccino and rising property costs. The crash has since jeopardised all these simulacra of metropolitan living. The odd thing – the unfair thing, considering where the crash originated – is that the metropolis itself is immune. Geographically, never mind socially, we are not all in this together. Life in London now feels different to anywhere outside, as though you leave through city gates at turn-offs on the M25. Never has its atmosphere as a rich city-state felt so extreme. “Revenues have bounced back and we are again seeing strong sales growth. The outlook for the UK as a whole may be gloomy but I think the long-term prospects for London, especially with the Olympics, are very good.” These are the words of Des Gunewardena, who runs a chain of expensive restaurants (Le Pont de la Tour, Quaglino’s) and I read them last week in the Evening Standard, underneath the headline, “Surge in dining out feeds a flurry of restaurant launches”, next to a picture of Sienna Miller arriving at Sheekey’s. Each in the list of a dozen new restaurants still to open has the name of a chef attached. One of those already opened, the Pollen Street Social in Mayfair, took 5,000 calls looking for reservations in its first day. Beyond the hope that manufacturing industry can rebalance the economy, and the faraway prospect of a high-speed rail line to Birmingham, no government strategy exists to spread this wealth further north. The political tone is southern – look at the party leaders, or many of the Labour candidates parachuted to northern seats. It has been left to the BBC to do a little social engineering by – bravely or foolishly – relocating departments to Salford, Cardiff and Glasgow, so that half of its output will be produced outside London by 2016. Will better programmes result? Very few BBC staff seem to think so; on the evidence of BBC2′s Review Show, now made in Glasgow, extra expense in travel and hotel costs looks the likeliest difference. But three formerly great industrial cities will have BBC budgets and salaries added to their troubled economies; there will be job opportunities; the middle class in each place should grow a little larger. The staff who refuse to go are easily mocked. Haven’t they heard about the better quality of life, the Lowry, the easily accessed countryside, the “creative buzz” that’s now reported along the banks of the Clyde and the Manchester ship canal? Their reluctance to move is usually expressed in personal and professional terms: of not wanting to interrupt their children’s education, or being too far away from their show’s guests. But perhaps among their worries there’s something less easy to define; that by quitting London they’re removing themselves from its cultural, political and economic heft, which has grown so remorselessly and, whether or not BBC Breakfast gets done in Salford, will carry on regardless. The country’s centrifuge: both awful and interesting.
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April 16 2011, 11:21am | Comments »
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Radioactive water from Japan’s Fukushima plant is leaking into sea
Tepco officials say that a 20cm crack found in a containment pit under reactor two may be source of radioactive water from Japan‘s Fukushima plant leaking into the sea.
This article titled “Radioactive water from Japan’s Fukushima plant is leaking into sea” was written by David Batty and agencies, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 2nd April 2011 12.14 UTC Radioactive water from Japan’s quake-striken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant is leaking into the sea, its operator said. The 20cm (8in) crack in a containment pit under reactor two may be the source of recent radiation in coastal waters, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) officials said. Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director-general of the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said Tepco was planning to pour concrete into the pit to seal the crack, which may have been leaking since the magnitude 9.0 earthquake three weeks ago. “This could be one of the sources of seawater contamination,” Nishiyama said. “There could be other similar cracks in the area, and we must find them as quickly as possible.” Readings released on Saturday showed radiation in seawater had spread to 25 miles (40km) south of the plant. The concentration of iodine there was twice the legal limit, but officials stressed it was still well below levels that are dangerous to human health. The announcement of the radioactive leak came as Japan’s prime minister Naoto Kan surveyed the damage in the town of Rikuzentakata, which was gutted by the devastating tsunami that hit the country following the quake. The prime minister bowed his head for a minute of silence in front of the town hall, one of the few buildings still standing, which has all its windows blown out and debris piled up in front of it. “The government fully supports you until the end,” Kan later told 250 people at an elementary school that is serving as an evacuation centre. He met with the town’s mayor, Megumi Shimanuki, whose 38-year-old wife was swept away in the wave and is still missing. Shimanuki, whose family is living in a similar shelter 100 miles (160km) away in Natori, said Kan did not spend enough time with people on the ground. “The government has been too focused on the Fukushima power plant rather than the tsunami victims,” said Shimanuki, 35. “Both deserve attention.” One member of the power plant crew described difficult conditions inside the complex in an interview in the Mainichi newspaper. He said the plant has run out of the nylon protective booties that workers put over their shoes. “We only put something like plastic garbage bags you can buy at a convenience store and sealed them with masking tape,” said the anonymous worker. He added that the grounds of the power plant were littered with dead fish churned up by the tsunami. Japanese media reported that nuclear workers had been offered up to 400,000 yen (£3,000) a day to work inside the crippled reactors. Before the crisis some contract workers were reportedly being paid as little as 10,000 to 20,000 yen (£75 to £150) a day. Three weeks after the tsunami more than 165,000 people are living in shelters, while 260,000 households still do not have running water and 170,000 do not have electricity.
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April 2 2011, 2:40pm | Comments »
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