Doublethink 24 - Short-term Slavery

 

Deconstructing Boris

By Martin Cohen 

'Deconstruction,' wrote Jacques Derrida, 'is justice.' Yet deconstruction's effectiveness has been questioned as a political tool. Often it has been accused of political quietism. No clear political consequences may be drawn, it is said, from an interpretive theory that claims that all meanings are unstable. Chomsky condemned Derrida as 'plain gibberish'.

But watch, as we apply some deconstruction to a topical issue in the context of British politics. There's plenty of gibberish emerging, and that fact reflects not a fault in the deconstructionist technique but rather that a great deal of political language is, as deconstructionists might say, 'at variance with itself '. Put another way, there are contradicitons and exposing contradictions is the proper task of both politics and philosophy.

Now to the case in point. 

Earlier this month (May 2016) Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson stepped down as Mayor of London – his eyes apparently firmly set on becoming the next Prime Minster of England. As leading light of the British campaign to 'free itself' from the European Superstate, his fate depends now on public pereceptions of his good character and honesty. And a central element of his political platform – his explicit policy – is to speak out determinedly against political leeches – famously referring to those who have 'their little jaws wrapped blissfully around the giant polymammous udder of the state'. It is a comment which may come to follow him around for some time to come.

Now, in terms of deconstruction, what one does is to examine Johnson's stated policy for any signs of oppositions which may be at variance with it or work against it. Happily – though not for Johnson – we do not need to look far. Johnson himself has not been above appointing cronies to publicly funded positions as special advisors.

There are, on the one hand, the unpaid advisors who come from the ranks of the great and the good. Then there are the paid ones, the media moles, the political cronies … and the City financiers lining their own nests. They are paid, despite seeming often to have few special duties or responsibilities other than to make up a kind of political court for Boris Johnson.

Some examples already in the public eye:

• Political

Ian Clement, conservative apparatchik (government and external relations, £124,364) who was forced to quit over the misuse of a corporate credit card, and for claiming back expenses for a business dinner with the Tory leader of Barnet council Mike Freer, which appears not to have taken place. Just days after his boss, Boris Johnson, publicly stood by him.

Richard Barnes, (Deputy mayor for communities, salary £92,594)
Conservative London assembly member for Ealing and Hillingdon and previously leader of Hillingdon borough council.

• Media

Guto Harri, The former BBC political correspondent (£124,364).

Anthony Browne, Policy director (£124,364), former Observer and Times journalist, director of the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange,

Andrew Gilligan, senior reporter for the Daily Telegraph, and his cycling advisor whose meagre workload in 2015 included 'Lunch with Chief Reporter Telegraph re Mayor's cycle vision' … for which he claimed back £80. His modest special advisor salary of £50k (pro rata, but in addition to his Telegraph one) notwithstanding.

But above all it is the City connections that are most alarming. And here the sums of public money flowing towards private wallets run into the millions and multimillions.

• City Chums

After his victory, partly based on protecting the City of London from EU regulation, he appointed one of the City donors to his election campaign, Edmund Lazarus, to a £14,000-a-year spot on the board of the London Development Agency.

With so many dodgy appointments, attention has hardly been focused on one unpaid advisor: Edi Truell, a multimillionaire city financier who the Mayor appointed as his unpaid special advisor for pensions. However, Edi Truell is perhaps the most dangerous appointment of them all.

At his confirmation hearing in London, it emerged that he was being confirmed without providing a CV. 'We asked about a CV and we were advised by the Mayor’s office that his letter recommending appointment gave a summary of what he felt were the qualities of the candidate.'

Nor, worryingly, did he provide the committee with a list of possible conflicts of interests. Apart from the one about selling insurance to pension funds, and the strange project to sell 'sustainable renewable' energy to the UK via a fantastically long cable from hot springs in Iceland.

It all gets rather too complicated. The details are in the public domain for those who should wish to unravel them and I've written a bit more here. But the long and the short of it is that Truell would seem to have his  little jaws wrapped blissfully around the giant polymammous udder of the state. At the city financier's confirmation hearing to become Boris's pensions guru, it emerged that in at least one case – pensions management – he stood to make millions of pounds from his new role. This money however, Truell reassured the committee, was pledged already to charity.

To return to the beginning. Has some simple deconstruction proved its political punch? Surely yes. Whatever we thought of Johnson, we cannot think the same after the application of the technique. In fact we would do well to apply it in every political arena. One may easily take politics at face value – just as one may take Boris at face value – digging no deeper than his vivid objections to political leeches, and in the next few weeks his loud and apparently passionate denunciations of the European Superstate as the home of elitism and the enemy of democracy.

Whatever Derrida may have meant by the term,  deconstruction, in such cases, is an essential political tool.

Diet Tips of the Great Philosophers ≠92: Henry Thoreau and Green Beans

Posted by Martin Cohen

Many of the philosophers whom we rely on to represent little oases of good sense and rationality in a disorganised world, disappointingly turnout, on closer inspection, to be not only rather eccentric, but downright irrational. David Henry Thoreau, an anarchist who eked out a living by making pencils while living in a shed by a pond, on the other hand, appears even at first glance to be rather eccentric. Short, shabby, wild-haired and generally rather unprepossessing, he nonetheless seems to have anticipated much of the ecological renaissance that today’s philosophers (and diet gurus) have only just begun to talk about. Oh, and yes, he was always rather thin.

In his Journal entry for January 7, 1857, Thoreau says of himself: 

'In the streets and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it - dining with the Governor or a member of Congress! But alone in the distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine.

I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I come home to my solitary woodland walk as the homesick go home. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful. . . I wish to . . . be sane a part of every day.'

He is famous for having spent two years living in a small wood cabin by a pond, and living off, not so much three fruits of the woods, but his own allotment. Naturally, Thoreau was a vegetarian. He remarks how one farmer said to him: ‘You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make the bones with;’ even as the farmer:

‘... religiously devoted a part of his day to supplying himself with the raw material of bones, walking all the while behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plow along in spite of every obstacle.’

Thoreau himself cultivated, not so much an allotment, as a small bean farm, of two and a half acres, which provided for himself the bulk of the food he ate –peas, corn, turnips, potatoes and above all green beans, the last of which crop he sold for extra cash. During the second year, he reduced his crops, if anything, writing:

‘ … that if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would need to cultivate only a few rods of ground, and that it would be cheaper to spade up that than to use oxen to plow it, and to select a fresh spot from time to time than to manure the old, and he could do all his necessary farm work as it were with his left hand at odd hours in the summer.’

He drank mainly water, writing that it was ‘the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor’ and worrying about the temptations of a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea!

From life in the woods he learned, among other things, that it ‘cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one’s necessary food’ and that ‘a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.’

In a chapter of his most famous book, Walden, entitled simply, ‘The Bean Field,’ Thoreau records how:

‘I came to love my rows, my beans… They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer — to make this portion of the earth’s surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work.’

For Thoreau, buying food, allowing others to grow food for him, would have disconnected him from the land, from direct contact with Nature, the source of both his bodily and spiritual nourishment. It was not enough to just have something to eat; he also wanted the experience of growing it.

Diet tips:

Food that you’ve grown has a special quality
You don’t need to eat a huge range of things to be healthy 

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Poetry: A Royal Question

Editorial note: In this poem, Chengde talks at one level about the Queen of England, a topic of perennial interest to the English and the social media - but evidently of rather limited 'philosophical' interest. However, we feel he uses the theme to explore deeper and and more subtle issues. Is he making a very contemporary point about the relationship of parents and children – and how economic power can lie (stay) with the parents even in old age?

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A poem by Chengde Chen 

A Royal Question

With Her Majesty’s 90th birthday approaching,
Britain can’t help asking an inconvenient question:
why still no sign of abdication?
Apart from anything else, won’t the 68-year-old future king
become too old for his future?
It is said that there are two reasons for her persisting.

One, it’s a British tradition that the monarch doesn’t retire.
Two, she made her vow in her coronation to serve for life.
Yet, how does she see her heir apparent’s situation?
Isn’t a mother’s devotion an instinctive “tradition” and “vow”?
If a ceremonial title weighs more than her son’s happiness,
hasn’t wearing the crown exhausted her motherhood?

To succeed to the throne is a prince’s natural desire,
much as students want to graduate or fledglings want to fly.
The humiliation of the long wait, the grey hair from restraint:
wouldn’t the mother have seen and understood?
She can pretend not to have, or choose to ignore them, but
can she ignore the resentment growing in his heart?

If he is waiting for, or even longing for, his mother’s…,
what would this mean to her?
The soul-stirring succession stories that happened in history
–the internal strife, the murderous fighting with drawn swords–
are the logical development of prince psychology.
To keep the throne, or the son, that is the question.



 

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Chengde Chen is the author of Five Themes of Today: philosophical poems. Readers can find out more about Chengde and his poems here

A Liberation Economics

Image courtesy of liberation blog

Posted by Thomas Scarborough 

We no longer live in a state of nature. Over the course of centuries, our vocations have become more specialised, and more distanced from our roots.

Our workplaces now at a distance, our knowledge contained in isolated pools, our tools manufactured by others, our potential curbed by managers, and our recovery-time limited by numbers on a wall – among other things – the question is pressing as to how we should best accommodate vast changes as we move through time and through history.
 
We tend to underestimate the hapless way in which we have managed the change, and the burdens we have brought upon ourselves. Consider the word 'employment' – derived from the Latin implicare, to enfold. We may thus be seen to be enfolded by employers: surrounded, enveloped, even engulfed. The consequences need no introduction: traffic jams, night shifts, equipment malfunctions, red tape, even surrendering our children to strangers. Fatigue, oppressive environments, unrealistic targets, and demands beyond our ability to cope. Nor are we free to be excused: to the point, sometimes, of exhaustion, depression, road rage, divorce, even suicide.



It is the selling of oneself and being sold, judged Karl Marx. In fact long has the debate raged as to whether we merely are marketable goods. However, while there is little doubt that this is so in the case of slavery and forced labour, in the best of situations we may be confused. If we are commodities, we are surely cherished commodities: valued colleagues, graciously accommodated, and thoughtfully motivated. Yet even so, in view of the heavy burdens which most of us bear, it seems hard to deny that we are in fact held – in many respects, at least – in bondage.

But things have been changing. The tide has been turning. Since the advent of modern economic theory, a simplistic view of employment has given way to a far more holistic view – and on this basis I shall, in a moment, suggest a way forward.

Economic theory, in its infancy, assumed that the goal of economics was growth of income per head. While there was growth indeed, there was, too, deepening poverty, social disintegration, and environmental destruction, worldwide. The sums did not translate into general well-being. This led then to much revision – welfare economics being the result. The welfare of individuals now moved to centre stage – where 'welfare' is defined as our being provided with adequate goods and services.

Yet we know that we need more than that. We need freedom, happiness, entertainment, rest, and so much more. The welfare model was (and is) inadequate. With this in mind, a more holistic successor emerged, although this is not yet widely applied. Called the Capability Approach, this blended economic theory aims to maximise workers' capability. That is, economics ought to assist us in becoming rounded human beings in a healthy society.

Let me now combine these thoughts. We see the tendency towards greater holism in economics. Put this together now with the bondages we have described. What is suggested is liberation from these bondages, in a holistic environment – above all, as affects our working lives. Yet how may this be done? Having created the monster, are we able to escape it?

Let us try a bold thought experiment – and turn current economic theories on their head. Supposing that we ought not to work, but to be set free from work – to follow a vocation – where 'vocation' is derived from the Latin vocare, to call. We are called, not driven. Supposing then that, in keeping with this, employees are rewarded with the purpose of releasing them from employment, into their vocations. The same has been practised for centuries by religious movements, which through a stipend set their clergy free from secular pursuits.

The goal of society, then, would be to remove impediments to its citizens' callings. Any number of impediments may (again) be named: traffic jams, red tape, unrealistic targets, as well as many further burdens which lie beyond the workplace. And for a moment thinking more broadly: it is not hard to see that the liberation of the individual may further release an entire population: from gridlock, bureaucracy, or disorganisation, to name but a few examples.

'Freedom' is the watchword – in this case freedom to work Yet unlike other economic theories, such as the Capability Approach, where freedom tends to be seen as extraneous to one's work, freedom in this case is central. Call it a Liberation Economics. The worker is no longer enfolded by an employer. And the individual's ability to serve a vocation to their full potential should permit – even encourage – service outside the confines of a particular working relationship, company, or state – to work for the benefit of the world.

Notice, too, a radical implication. In the workplace, and its environment, not only do we fight for something now. We fight against it. This gives such a Liberation Economics a revolutionary edge – if not a religious edge, with the suggestion of sin, and justice.

Finally, (post) modern economic theories are no longer self-adjusting, as the political economist Adam Smith once envisaged: namely, leave people to themselves, and the rest will follow. Holistic economic theories require the support of the society of which we all are a part.

The Capability Approach, as an example, presupposes constitutional guarantees, human rights legislation, and development policy, among other things. It need hardly be said that a Liberation Economics, here described, is in one sense idealistic. It will only survive in an economic environment which sustains it. In a selfish, competitive environment, it will die. Its principles would need to be protected by legislation which is written into the very groundwork of society.