Best Laid Plans

No insights here, just a question - what are Marxists doing with themselves at the moment? I've come into contact with a few personally, shot the breeze with them, but never really asked them much about what they believe, because I don't really want to have very emotive discussions  with people who a. are basically on my side and b. use terminology I've never been entirely comfortable with about commodity and relations of production and labour value which may well be bullshit but is impossible to argue with because it exists in an economic theoretical universe outside my broadly Keynesian one. We may as well be talking Portugese to each other's shirt buttons.

Still, they're still around, keeping on keeping on, and why shouldn't they? It does seem a bit odd to be basing the fundamentals of your Weltanschauung on  a German intellectual who died more than a century ago who was critiquing a specific moment in capitalism's development. Surely times have changed now, and it all feels a bit theological to me. But capitalism remains horrible in many ways for many people, and Marx's analysis of it was probably the most important ever made, if flawed (It is a little embarrassing watching modern Marxists trying to fit everything into a class-struggle frame at a time when class solidarity is on its way out for many reasons). So it makes sense that people searching for the alternative still plump for the one that critiques the current system in the most lasting and fundamental way.

But having looked through a few blogs and websites of functioning modern Marxists, I can't find much of an alternative system being proposed. Apart from the obvious stuff, seizure of the means of production, nationalisation of everything, the abolition of the stock exchange and all that - but there doesn't seem to be any idea of what to do about allocation of resources.This was always the big problem (apart from totalitarian systems required to prop up the revolutionary state, as I have said before) with times when Marxism has been tried practically - planned economies just don't really work. Humans just are insufficiently capable of organising the complexities of something as massive as an economy. Because we're a bit shit in general.

This is the reason I'm still a capitalist - for all its faults, it does a fairly good job of getting resources to the right place. A well made tractor sells well, a bad one sells badly, and the profit motive ensures companies making bad tractors have to catch up, raising overall standards. The invisible hand of the market. In a planned economy, there is no equivalent mechanism foolproof enough to ensure standards are kept high across the board.

After the massive failures of the twentieth century socialist experiments (and I am not wholly scornful of the excuse that they mainly derived from what seems to me a bizarre, unfortunate historical fluke and suffered accordingly), shouldn't Marxists be focussed not on their critique of capitalism, which, after all, we basically get by now, but on fixing that one massive hole in their argument? I am happy to hear about the plan to make the socialist market responsive without the profit motive. But nothing presents itself to me right now.

And this suggests to me another problem with Marxism as it has stood all along. It still treats capitalism as an ideology. But it isn't. Capitalism is what happens when you have an absence of ideology, which usually ends up meaning the powerful aggregate power and use it to cement their advantage. But it also suggests that the unplanned method of exchange inherent in capitalism is just what humans do anyway. Marxism still hasn't accepted that there is no grand conspiracy to keep humans motivated by profit, commodity, surplus value and the rest. It's just what they do, and until they provide an alternative system that fits human behaviour as naturally as does capitalism, I'm going to retain my belief that the best we pretty shit humans can do is ameliorate the awfulness of it all. It's hardly the Internationale, but it'll have to do as a rallying cry.

Arise, the wretched of the earth! No, genuinely, you're all crap.

The Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up

On my Christmas wish list in my imagined life where I actually have time to read everything on my Christmas wish list (which stretches to just about everything in the Western canon before it begins to grapple with the publications of this decade) is Francis Spufford's Unapologetic: Why despite Everything Christianity Still Makes Surprising Emotional Sense. I'm not usually one for Christian apologia - being forced to read Mere Christianity (I take challenges from my Christian friends very seriously) aged 16 has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, a taste brought back by the recent readings of the Screwtape Letters on Radio 4. CS Lewis is very, very annoying, and I might put my finger on why in a future post.

This isn't apologia, though, at least not conventionally. No argument here for why Christianity is true. More, it's an exploration of why Christianity touches on human truths that are just sort of there, and does so very effectively. It's something I've been thinking of with the departure of Mandela - it doesn't need adherence to the Bible to think of his ability to forgive an enemy as both morally superb and practically incisive. To me, Jesus wasn't God or possibly anything like what has come down to us in the Gospels, but whoever did write the words about forgiveness was expressing a radical and quite brilliant insight, one that deserves to have lasted the ages - to love one's enemies is a very good idea, because it breaks cycles of retribution. Assuming one's enemies don't manage to crush you, they gain no power from your riposte, which in conventional human conflict provides most of the momentum to keep fighting. If you can survive and stay in opposition to them, they have to give you slack. Not for nothing does this doctrine derive from an occupied part of the Roman Empire, historically very good at reaching compromises with the peoples it governed. I'm not in for bashing the New Atheists as is fashionable, but I wish they did allow for this rather excellent distinction of Christianity. If you treat it as a pretty good universal truth that Christianity happened to get to first, it's easier to bear.

Anyway, it's not forgiveness I'm thinking about with this book, but rather the phrase from the book which has been doing the rounds, The Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up. This is Spufford's new paraphrase of Original Sin, an idea which I've always viewed with a great deal of suspicion. OS is a doctrine which treats (or can treat, all too easily, if your pastor isn't very good) humans as shameful, human lusts and appetites and ambitions as things to be hated and rejected, and one's position in the universe as something to apologise for, forever attempting to expiate one's own lowliness with yet more grovelling before a far superior being. It is a self-loathing anti-humanism that at its best end makes teenagers feel ashamed of that handjob they got at Mike's party on Saturday and at its worst end leads to the death-worshipping jihadists for whom no murder is beyond the pale when human beings are of so little value anyway.

We're just not really up to much

I like humility, though. It's just that the Christian religion has so rarely done anything to balance that humility with self-belief. To me, the humanist motto is "I raise my head in humility" - that is to say, I am a tiny creature in a vast and unknowable universe, but while I am alive, I will be fiercely proud of who I am. It is a balance almost impossible to get right, but at least humanism sees (or should see) that balance as worth getting right. Self-belief is not something I hear Christians talk about much, because it will always require the intervention of a God somewhere along the line, which ultimately can never be true self-belief.

Now, the reason I like The Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up or HPtFTU is because it does not cast human falleness as a matter of shame as OS does. Rather than being still culpable of the sin of Adam and Eve (which as Pullman pointed out at length in His Dark Materials, was actually pretty wonderful - the pride to acquire knowledge, to explore, experiment and know), the fallen state of Man is recast as 7 billion klutzes pratfalling on a truly epic scale, an endless cosmic Mr Bean episode where getting a turkey stuck on the head is replaced by everything from snapping at Mum as she tries to tell you how to properly chop an onion to occasional genocide. The reason this works so well for me is that it is not condemnatory - we fail because we are human. We're all just a bit useless really. We're just fucking monkeys in shoes, as Tim Minchin has it.

The reason this is so important to me is that it finally fills a gap I feel in my own ideological makeup. I'm a secular liberal. But liberalism and leftism generally has always had the problem of utopianism built into it. The Whiggish view of history saw humans as on course for eventual perfectibility (few Whiggish historians post-date the Holocaust, unsurprisingly), Marxists see a wonderful communist method of exchange post revolution, and simple liberals seem to see us in the West as doing rather well now, an Enlightened bunch free from the silliness of racism and homophobia and all that nonsense. Thing is, despite my liberalism, I've always felt an affinity for the Burkean tragic view of humanity. I see the whole edifice of civilisation ready to collapse at any moment and mere anarchy just raring to be let out of its cage.

A shot from the inevitable gritty reboot of Mr Bean

This is probably why I read the Dish and other moderate conservative outlets - it is good to be reminded occasionally that humans don't really change much apart from in material circumstance. The Catholic view of Sin - that there is nothing new under the sun - appeals to me greatly. One of the rather endearing traits of the standard CiF poster is, despite their feigned cynicism, an actual surprise that leaders are corrupt and people do bad things. I've never got very outraged about the abuses of power because I expect them to happen. I just think that every gain should be celebrated as a surprise, since by definition liberals are fighting the most powerful interests in the world all the time.

Liberalism, I think, needs to rediscover its tragic sense of humanity. The gimlet-eyed impish moral certainty of Thomas Paine and Jeremy Bentham can't last for long in as multivalent a world as ours, and has degenerated into liberal smugness, which has turned a great many people off the progressive causes. I take for an example the man who says what he said can't possibly be racist, because he's a liberal. Racism is bad, and I'm enlightened. Or homophobia is bad, but I'm enlightened, so when I say something's "gay" obviously I mean it ironically. You get the idea.

The brilliance of an idea like HPtFTU is that it reminds us that we're all a bit crap, without diving into the God thing. The Avenue Q song "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" gets to the heart of the matter: yeah, you're probably racist. So am I. We need to be vigilant about it, so we need to accept it first. The liberal tragic view of humanity is that we're all constantly fighting our own demons, and all of us are at any moment liable to drop everything and be shit human beings again. The humility that comes with this is essential to convincing opponents of our righteousness. It would also prevent a great deal of the utopianism that leads to bad liberal governments that never see the obstacles coming *coughhealthcare.govcough* and the inability to see their own self-righteousness that makes left-wing activism, however valid, usually quite annoying. Jesus' insight about the beam in the eye is another pretty good one. A liberalism driven by that religious thought is bound to end up a stronger liberalism. Ironically.

On Intersectionality

Lola Okolosie writes in the Guardian today about intersectionality, one of those words my spellchecker dislikes and my inner Englishman distrusts. It sounds a bit academic, a bit foreign, possibly French. Doesn't sound very common-sense. You couldn't say it down the pub, and is therefore suspect.

It basically suffers, like a number of words that describe perfectly good things, from having been invented during an era of academia rather than being a salty, natural part of human conversation. It describes the fact that all oppression is related, and therefore we should see a black feminism, for example, as different to to the feminism of a middle class white woman. A complex interweaving of different oppressive structures isn't exactly the sort of thing Anglo Saxons were interested in when they were coming up with their lovely words like "carve" "elbow" and "cheese", that do exactly what is said on the also-Anglo-Saxon tin. The complicated nature of oppression is not served by our words "tyranny" "barbarism" or anything else we regularly use because they were invented by people facing a much less multipolar set of oppressions. It is left to people who have read Gramsci and Foucault to unlock this kind of stuff.

And that makes it very hard to explain to people. Worse, it makes it hard to explain just what people should do about it. You explain feminism to the man in the street, and hopefully he'll say "Blimey! I suppose we should get Page 3 out of The Sun and achieve parity of paternity and maternity leave!" (or something like that). Explain intersectionality, (which will take a longer time in any case) and he'll say "Right. So we should probably... look closely at how oppression is all related. And then... do something about it. I think."

Admittedly this is probably a street in Paris

Actually, Okolosie's piece was much better about it than I've seen before, and I felt like I was getting it more than usual:

White, middle-class and young women are often seen as the ones spearheading this new wave of activity. Their high-profile campaigns – to have women on banknotes, challenge online misogyny and banish Page 3, for example – though necessary and praiseworthy, do not reflect the most pressing needs of the majority of women, black and minority-ethnic women included. The problem is not that these campaigns exist, but that they are given a focus and attention that overshadows other work feminists are engaged with.

That seems very valid to me. It presents a bit of a problem though, because if we do create a bunch of "feminisms", as Okolosie's piece suggests, it leaves people like me with a bit of a quandry. I am not black, which assuming that part of the problem has been middle class white people hijacking feminism, means that most of what I can offer will be more of the same. I would feel very inauthentic volunteering for Women Asylum Seekers Together, for instance, because if I was doing so based on an intersectional insight I would also notice that the whole point was that the experience of actually being black or Pakistani and female counts. The further away the relevant identity drifts from me, the less I feel I can help.

What I can do, chiefly, is talk to my friends about things I know about, and that I know they have experience of. That's why the white middle class female experience figures largely in my feminist imagination. It's a jump for me to put myself in the woman's position, but one I am just about comfortable making. If, however, I were to reorientate my feminism intersectionally, I would be talking about the experience of South Asian women who live an immigrant life in Burnley, say. Not only would I be less authentic, but this would precisely defeat the point of actually seeing that someone else's experience is important.

That leaves me both quite clear of what Okolosie means and unsure of what she wants me to do. Keep quiet and let more important minority-concerned feminism speak louder by comparison would be the obvious thing, but I doubt she'd want that, and in any case, you can't rank the problems of the world in order of severity and solve them one at a time. You've got to do what you can, and I'm just not sure there's much I can do to be a good ally to a black feminism or a poor feminism or an Islamic feminism. I fear all this leads to People's Front of Judea territory, with a thousand different feminisms all clamouring for attention and not accepting each other's help.

Whatever happened to the holders-of-degrees-in-social-anthropology feminists anyway?

This is all very complex, and just writing about it makes my head ache. What do I actually mean? Chiefly, that I understand the need for intersectionality, but also not sure whether it will actually change anyone's behaviour. The maligned middle class feminists, even if convinced, will go on with their own campaigns for equality because its what they feel they can do best, since the black experience should be left to black feminism or risk being swamped by whitesplaining women. And given that they're the ones with the media influence, their story will continue to dominate.

All very difficult. Let's go back to first principles, then. How to communicate intersectionality? The way I would explain it down the pub is "If a fucker wants to fuck you over, they'll use everything they can about you to fuck you over. And then you're fucked in a whole bunch of different ways. And those ways add up to more than the sum of their fuck-parts" So, to coin a good Anglo-Saxon word for intersectionality, I suggest sumfuckery. It's worth a shot.

Why I'm Not Writing About Liberty And The Police

I'm a Liberal Democrat, though I detest this coalition. I'm on the liberal left - I accept the Labour critique of capitalism's excesses but dislike its authoritarianism. That means I oppose over-weaning spying powers, ID cards, 42 day detention, Trident, and the rest of it. What worries me though, is a niggling feeling I should be more concerned about these things. Given that it's the dividing line between myself and another strain of leftism, and is the main reason to keep supporting the party, shouldn't it be one of my main concerns?

I was genuinely disturbed though not shocked by the Snowden revelations. The recent news that Cambridgeshire police have been offering money to those willing to inform on "student uniony stuff" (the idea that CUSU does anything at all would surprise many Cantabs, let alone that they were doing criminal stuff) outraged me. And yet I still don't get very exercised by it except out of duty. Why not?

Primarily, I think, because I still feel safe. I have the provincial Englishman's faith in the police force that hasn't been shaken by a lifetime diet of left wing reading. Orwell sums this up rather nicely along with many other things about Englishness in The Lion and the Unicorn:

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like ‘They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong’, or ’They can’t do that; it’s against the law’, are part of the atmosphere of England...  Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered.

It is probably a blind spot of the British that they are insufficiently alive to the possibility of true corruption. They grumble about MPs being crooks and cheats, they tell us that they're all in it to fill their pockets or serve corporations or dictate their PC worldview. But it's rarely particularly heartfelt, which is probably something to do with hundreds of years of being ruled over by a corrupt aristocratic elite that was slowly losing its power anyway, so was only ever worth grumbling about. 

We've never had Nazis or Vichy or gulags or the mafia routinely murdering judges. The true possibility of power's corruption is largely unformed in our collective consciousness, except in those Englishmen who have immigrated from other less forgiving climes. The police force doesn't scare me because I see it as something relatable. A film like Hot Fuzz works because the implied power of an American policeman - sharp uniform, powerful cars, powerful guns - contrasts tellingly with a police force with a penchant for jumpers and hi vis jackets. We're basically you, says the English policeman, but we're in these silly clothes and we have a job to do and just behave, please? Then there are videos like this:  

All of which masks the truth that for many in the UK whose lives I have no contact with, relations with the police remain fraught and policemen do abuse their power. They are also corrupt enough to accept bribes from the press, possibly shoot innocent people, punch protesters in the face, spy on democratic activists, and have children with activists while spying on them.

The reason why I still fail to get annoyed with the police is because I can see how in large institutions things get out of hand. In any organisation where you need results, people do stupid things. Mass surveillance is very helpful to the police, and for one or two jobs, essential, and if you're in a position of power where your job is to stop something that's come to define your job, restraint on arbitrary grounds would indeed seem annoying. I have no idea why they keep going for activists. My left wing friends insist it's because they're the tool of corporate interests, but this doesn't really convince me. It seems more likely that there's a long standing suspicion of activists in the police refreshed every few years when they have to go and monitor a demonstration where people smash things. 

Should I be worried about this? I still find it hard to be. The fact is that police forces all over the world are considerably worse, and police trust even after the last few battering years is holding up well. So the rather uncomfortable position must be held between the authoritarians who see criminality everywhere and want to hit it and the anti-authoritarians for whom the police are and always will be the enemy. There has to be a place for people who see the police force as very easily corruptible, and will criticise it as such, but believe it's doing okayish just about.

That's probably the best I can do for now, but my concern for civil liberties will need a good kick up the arse by an actual large-scale and suitably impressive breach of liberty before I get on this horse again.

A Pope For The Whiskey Priests

I sent my thoughts on Francis and his particular brand of Catholicism to Andrew Sullivan's blog The Dish, they can be seen here.

Goodbye Mandela

Last night I attended a performance of The Magic Flute at the ENO, and sometime in the middle, while Mozart's music proclaimed the progress of humanity from darkness into enlightenment, Nelson Mandela passed on in a bed thousands of miles away. I found out because my companion's Facebook newsfeed, checked upon leaving the building, was full of the tributes we'd all been waiting to give all year. This is how we learn of momentous things now. I think it's quite nice.

We walked to Trafalgar Square to see if anyone was gathering at South Africa House, and sure enough, there was a group of people clustered around in the bitter December cold outside the gates. A nascent shrine was growing, only a few flowers and a photo so far. No one knew what they were doing there, just that they wanted to stand in silence with some other people somewhere significant. They had formed a semicircle, and a couple of South African ladies were tirelessly singing old standards from the resistance days. I wished I could have joined in, but in my time in South Africa I only managed to learn Shosholoza and Nkosi Sikelel iAfrika, and these words were unfamiliar to me. A couple of white people nearby were singing under their breath. These were joyful songs of celebration, not mourning, and Mandela's name was frequently interwoven, shouted as a gleeful cry at the stars to mark his passing. Eventually, the beat the women were tapping out was taken up by the other bystanders, and we started stamping, a modest little contribution from a bunch of freezing, stoic Englishmen as a mark of respect.

I cried, not to my surprise. I felt very lucky to have heard that snatch of sung Xhosa (or was it Zulu? I will never know), just enough to make it concrete. I have visited the famous prison cell, lived amongst South Africans, have family who even served in his cabinet. I knew that when the moment came I would want to cry, but was afraid that it would all be too distant. The shouts of defiance, and the murmured memories of those who had come to Trafalgar Square many years ago to protest the apartheid regime, who had thought this the best place to be that night - these gave life to the moment, thank God. It was never really about Mandela for me, perhaps, rather that indefinable pang of sadness and admiration and that meek, unbearable flicker of hope that you get when faced with the image of a human, anywhere, who is weak and opposing the mighty. Mandela was merely the most famous such image remaining, and his passing is gutting not because he is a loss, but because the whole fact of his life is gutting to anyone paying attention, really.

I wish I could have something to add. This and Gary Younge  sum up many of my thoughts: he was political and had edge to him, and that shouldn't be forgotten. A radical and not a revolutionary, well, that's what I'd like to be. Never giving in to the urge to overthrow and destroy, but never relenting in the fight against the powerful, always being a thorn in someone's side.

One thing does stick in my mind though. There's been plenty on Facebook today about how we shouldn't use this to score political points. Well, hopefully not, though we will absolutely point out hypocrisy, and the Left should absolutely be clear that they got the apartheid thing right where the Right got it wrong. That is essential to remembering the struggle. These are not political points, this is a matter of honesty. If Cameron was a good man, he would come out and say his mind has been changed, but he and the Tory Party weren't into Mandela at the time. As it is, weasel words must suffice.

The point is, if the Right is honest, it will never be that interested in injustice. That's not the point of the Right. When Cameron was my age, he went to Apartheid South Africa to meet politicians, paid for by an anti-sanctions lobbying group. Whatever else he thought, South Africa was not his primary concern in the world. That's fine. He did not see the world in terms of a struggle between the strong and the weak. Justice was not as important to him as order, tradition, stability, and the rest of it - that's the point of being conservative (Convenient for him that his own social class does really well out of those things, but hey).

The fact that someone like Mandela comes out of history rather well due to concern for justice is embarrassing to conservatism. Their continual hypocrisy reminds me I am probably on the right side. Justice, in the end, is much sexier.

Obama gave Mandela the subtle tribute that "now he belongs to the ages", the same words used by Edwin Stanton as Lincoln died in front of him. Like Lincoln, before long it will be impossible to imagine that you could have lived at the same time as Mandela and found him despicable or even a cause for indifference. Cameron and his crowd will have to live with that, as the cause of progress marches on into the distance, leaving them in its dusty wake.

Though in the grave the pilgrims find their resting,

Reward their virtue’s brave road,

And take them into your home.

The Terrible Truth About Education Reform

A question is briefly on my mind after the release of this year's PISA scores. This is an event I am glad attracts a decent round of media attention every year, even though the tests themselves are of course a very flawed measure of educational comparison. I like it because it draws attention to the idiocy of education policy debate in the UK being dominated by school "choice", whatever mixture of faith schools, free schools academies, grammars, private school vouchers or what have you that the current government is using to impress floating middle-class voters. What we talk about when compare ourselves in actual results with our competitors is the stuff that actually matters: what is being taught, how it is being taught, the qualifications of teachers, the school hours, class sizes - the basic facts around which education revolves, not the most appealing grabbag of trendy new school types that tempts the sharp-elbowed into thinking they can out-do their neighbours for little Johnny.

I don't claim to know much about education policy, and I should, but I intuitively feel that education reform must revolve around a few very basic metrics. Metrics at which Shanghai and South Korea are doing particularly well at - long school days, well-respected and largely higher-degree holding teachers, intense competition in everything, and very high targets for all pupils. Private tuition is rife. Any school reform in the UK, if it chooses to avoid these fundamentals, must at least admit it is attempting the unlikely  task of doing more with less. Instead of faffing about with talk of different curricula, exam types, schools and yet more interference, Gove should be hammering away at finding better teachers and giving them a better environment in which to teach, for all schools, not just the free or the academised. This seems to be the Finnish lesson. Not that they're doing so great now either, compared to those countries who are are just willing to go harder for longer for their children.

Here's the thing - do we want to go harder on our children? This is partly a moral and partly a pragmatic question. If the metrics by which education is improved can be raised simply by bashing away at the basic questions of classroom respect/discipline, class time, homework levels, and the rest, then we've got to be honest with ourselves. At some level, either we want to win the "global race" or we want to be kind to our children. The children of South Korea are famously the unhappiest in the developed world. This seems to be largely because they are not seeing their parents any more, packed off to yet more private tuition or piano lessons while their parents simply get lost in the insane work hours of the modern Korean economy. And yet East Asia continues to cement its educational advantage on the backs of its suffering children.

My question is this. Is there a measurable economic downside to having a generation of overworked, lonely children grow up? If we are looking at human life in the mercilessly competitive economically utilitarian way that "global race" rhetoric asks us, could we conclude that the future workforce of a South Korea or Hong Kong will be so hobbled by mental illness and suicide that its productivity gains from a world-beating education will be as good as neutralised? This is crucial. If we are honest with ourselves, we are not going to beat the countries that try harder at educating their kids on PISA scores. If we can make the argument that trying too hard would be in the long run unproductive anyway, we might be able to find a comfortable middle ground where we both accept that education reform is dependent on fundamentals and that we should not push those fundamentals too far. That seems to me a better compromise than our current political's system's tendency to run away from the fact that a truly competitive education reform would be very painful for our children.

So yes, let's talk about reducing summer holidays, increasing teacher rewards (and liability), more Sure Start, more special needs focus, smaller class sizes, better discipline, and what have you. Be tough, if necessary, on everyone. But let's agree we don't want it to go too far. Let's take into account the economic value of happy children. And also to remember the value of creativity in a future economy, and pray that the kind of open-minded flexible children will be able to out-compete their peers in the maths-and-results-driven East. If not, we're leaving them to the wolves, but we're making sure they're happy while they wait.