“Health” Secretary Andrew Lansley seems to be in process of abandoning every health initiative taken by the previous Labour government, often based on a pretty near consensus of health professionals and social commentators and vigorously opposed by the food industry. Under the ConDems the corporations have won by the look of it, providing more evidence that pro business and private sector policies is all too often anti people and society policies. Mr Lansley, junk food and idiocy.

Perhaps a clue to why pro business is so often anti-people and society can be found in Pavan Sukhdev, head of the UN’s investigation into how to stop the destruction of the natural world, recent claim that modern businesses are “soulless corporations” that are in danger of becoming a “cancer” on society. He claims companies usually take a short-term view of the importance of the environment, and this short-term thinking is seen in their lobbying against new policies that could slow environmental devastation, he said. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/12/soulless-corporations-hurt-environment-pavan-sukhdev

This short-termism and unrelenting profit and growth orientation applies underpins a relentless and powerful resistance to all forms of regulation that create obstacles to ‘share holder value’. Things seem to have moved on very little since Friedman’s statement in the 1970s that in a “free-enterprise system” business’s only concern is with profit and has no responsibility for achieving desirable social ends (The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits).

Lansley has killed off traffic-light labelling, which exposes hidden salt, fat and sugar against the advice of the British Medical Association, the British Dietetic Association, the British Heart Foundation and dozens of other health and consumer groups. He has rejected a plan by National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence to prevent 40,000 deaths from heart disease, calling for a ban on trans fats, no TV junk-food advertising before 9pm and restrictions on takeaways close to schools. He plans to close the Food Standards Agency (although there is evidence this was already heavily influenced by the food industry and agribusiness).

His answer to all of this is that the food producers are in the best position to educate the public about healthy eating and diet. This is about as useful as saying casino financial interests are in the best positon to advise people on savings  and pension schemes.

It looks like it. I’ll keep some sort of a record of business and private sector benefits from the budget although, if this is the intention of the budget, there is plenty of scope for it to shoot business in both feet. Generally the outcome of an economic recession seems to be the increase and consolidation of the wealth of the few at the expense of the many. So far there is little reason to suppose that this one will be any different. What follows are random jottings as things emerge.

Academies and Free Schools

Chains and brands will develop. Management tasks will be consolidated. It makes no sense for every school to be a procurement agent, every school to have an account with a stationer. Some of the tasks of consolidation that have been poorly discharged by local education authorities (LEAs) will be taken over by charitable foundations, by co-operatives of teachers and, in time, by private companies. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/leading_article/article7116135.ece

Transfer of public sector services to the private sector. There seems to be a presumption that, by reducing public sector costs (and therefore reducing services) and promoting the private sector, the private sector will step in and offer the services the public sector will no longer provide. I’m sure I have heard this explicitly stated by the ConDem govt. but will need to check.

On the radio this morning it was reported that Pickles will introduce some controls over free local council free local newspapers. The argument is that these are often propaganda publications and they are unfair competition to privately owned ‘independent’ local papers that are suffering loss of circulation and advertising. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/politics/10423211.stm

I was impressed with the thinking behind Sekula’s approach to documentary photography and film that I posted on a little while ago (http://terrywassall.org/blogs/capitalism/2010/05/01/the-realism-of-the-abstact-an-encounter-with-sekula/) and have been thinking about how these ideas could be used to write a sort of material and economic history of an everyday object that would reveal in detail the process of its conception and production and the material and social relations that constructed it both as a material object, as a commodity and as a instance in the flow of capital. The idea goes something like this, imagining for instance a commemoration mug of some sort. It can be shown as a moment, a temporary coalescence, in the flow of time, space and human history. The origin of its potentiality and subsequent actualisation is in the Big Bang. Materially its substance is the product of the transformation of geology brought about by the appearance of life,  i.e.  chalk, clay, oxygen. The energy used by its manufacture is also the product of geology and life processes  (oxygen and fossil fuel).  It is also the product of a particular human and social history. The story of its conception and manufacture as a commodity is told in terms of human and cultural development, within  the development a globalising capitalist system of labour relations and commodification.   The mug will no doubt eventually break and possibly over 100s of years return to something like an aggregate of its physical components. If the whole process could  be speeded up the mug may well appear as a brief eddy, a fleeting shape shift,  in the flow and whirl of material processes (within which humanity makes a brief appearance) that have, on a different time scale, many of the characteristics of a flowing river in which temporary liquid structures are formed and dissipated in response to external, internal and contingent influences and events.  In terms of society, some aspects of the modern phase of this process have speeded up enough to become visible even on a human time scale, prompting  Zygmunt Bauman to introduce the concept of ‘liquid’ as a major component of his diagnosis of late modernity and a little earlier Marshal Berman to take Marx’s phrase All That Is Solid Melts into Air as the title of his book about the self-destructive nature of capitalist modernization and its relations to contemporary forms of consciousness.

Following  Sekula, the story of the mug would be a short segment of the story told above and told in terms of the labour relations embedded in the mug via its production under the conditions of globalising capitalism. David Harvey focusses on the impersonal flow of value and capital that privatises and commodifies all within its grasp under the ceaseless compulsion to accumulate and achieve 3% growth through and beyond each successive systemic crises, a feature of the capitalist economic system. He also sees commodities as the embodiment of social relations that produce value.

“But what kind of social relation is presupposed here? Value is an internal relation within the commodity. It internalises the whole historical geography of labour processes, commodity production and realization, and capital accumulation in the space-time of the world market” page xx in the introduction to the 2006 edition of The Limits of Capital, Verso.

I think this is pretty close to what Sekula attempts to make visible in his documentary photographs and films.

I have been reading up on Critical Theory and David Harvey’s work on capitalism recently. A couple of links for future reference:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/critical-theory/

http://davidharvey.org/2010/04/enigma-of-capital-lecture-at-lse/

http://davidharvey.org/2010/05/video-the-crises-of-capitalism-at-the-rsa/

http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

What values are the basis of critical theory’s a) negative critique of the (capitalist) status quo and b) whatever else it proposes as the ideal society to be achieved?

My starting points for a discussion of normativity:

1. There is no god so any normative position based on a religion is non-starter, for me at least.

2. The universe has no meaning or purpose other than that constructed by human beings who, through the evolution and development of consciousness is ‘nature becoming conscious of itself’ in the words of Marx.

3. Any normative discourse is a human creation/social construction.

4. There is no transcendental normative position that exists or can be grounded in any supposed pre-human or pre-social nature. Nature is both red in tooth and claw no doubt but it also provides many examples of symbiotic and apparently ‘altruistic’ behaviours. Ecological systems can have aspects construed and socially constructed under either heading. Neither is more real or authentic than the other ofrany possible interpretation and construction in between.

5. Democracy, equality, freedom, justice or any other normative term has no independent ontological reference or grounding.

6. All such terms, to the extent they have the empirical correlates, are partial. All freedom is within constraints. All democracy has asymmetries of power and influence. All equalities are formal and constructed.

7. All normative positions are matters of convention, negotiation, and in some way or another human made, elaborated and implemented.

8. This is an uncomfortable position in the sense that it asserts a radical normative relativism but is is encouraging as it does not hide from confronting the necessity for a political and social process to establish the normative basis of society.

9. Freedom equality and democracy, if agreed upon, are therefore achievable though action.

So critical theory’s normative basis is grounded in a Marxist analysis of capitalism and notions of equality, freedom and democracy. Can critical theory operate on the basis of the Marxist account of capitalism without also taking on its normative basis? Are the two inseparable anyway? Is an objective account of how capitalism works compatible with a variety of different normative bases?

If capitalism is criticised in terms of the distorted democratic systems, and the inequalities and unfreedoms it produces, then presumably the distortions are at least implicitly measured against ideal forms of democracy, equality and freedom. It is these specifications of the ideal that are the normative base. These, it could be argued, are transcendental. But do they have to be? For instance, as Sen points out, we do not need a philosopher’s specification of ideal equality to know that, in some places and at some times, some women are more equal than their mothers and grandmothers, or that the condition of some black Americans are in some important aspects more equal and free than their slave ancestors? Or am I wrong about this? Surely a critical theory can be built on this approach to looking at changes in freedom and equality? But if this is the case, then the normative discourse could be built on other approaches to critical theories not based on Marxism perhaps.

Sen? Norbert Elias? Who else?

Published by the University of Tokyo Centre for Philosphy

Table of Contents, Copyright
Preface: Yasuo Kobayashi : Download

Introduction
Reconfiguring Historical Time: Moishe Postone’s Interpretation of Marx
Viren Murthy : Download

1. Rethinking Marx’s Critical Theory
Moishe Postone : Download

2. Critical Theory and the Twentieth Century
Moishe Postone : Download

3. The Subject and Social Theory: Marx and Lukács on Hegel
Moishe Postone : Download

4. Theorizing the Contemporary World: Robert Brennet, Giovanni Arrighi, David Harvey
Moishe Postone : Download

As the world is hit by a food crisis, the markets see nothing immoral in skimming off a profit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/12/tasteles-profiteering-food-crisis

Today I went to a viewing of Allan Sekula’s 2006 film Lottery of the Sea followed by a symposium to layout and discuss the main themes of the film. The event was entitled Critical Realism and was hosted by CentreCATH at Leeds – A Transdisciplinary Initiative in Cultural Analysis, Theory and History. The film was 3 hours long and after a late lunch break I was only able to stay for the first three talks, all very interesting. Given the title of the session was critical realism it was not surprising that the content of the film was discussed in terms of a critique of global capitalism. This in any case was Sekula’s own purpose. Much of the discussion was, to my ears at any rate, a stimulating but unfamiliar mixture of the language of Marxist analysis of capitalism with that of aesthetics and photography and film as art.

A key topic of debate was how to interpret photographic images from a critical realist perspective. We no longer assume that a photograph is an objective and neutral record of what simply ‘is’. We are aware of how the photographer’s point of view and selection of subject constructs a photo before the process of cropping and post production manipulation. And, in any case, as one of our speakers said, “pictures know more than their authors”. The content of a picture is not bent entirely to the photographer’s will or subconscious framing. It is a representation of a reality that is initially autonomous with respect to the representation’s author. In documentary photography the reality pre-exists the photographer’s interest and intent and was already there to be found. Critical realism is based upon the idea that the reality available to the camera’s lens and our direct perception is the surface of underlying processes and mechanisms that are not immediately apparent in the visible aspect of the images projected onto our retinas or the photographic medium behind the lens. From a critical realist perspective the underlying processes and mechanisms are fundamentally those of the workings and logic of the globalising capitalist economy. It is this that prompts the (re)turn to Marx.

Marxist ideas also talk about hidden processes that need to be excavated so that what is apparent and visible can be understood as the product of the underlying processes. This structure of argument is explicit in Marx’s notions of reification, ideology, abstract labour and so on. The implication is that the photographic image can be unpacked in terms of the labour relations under the conditions of global capitalism that constructed the surface reality depicted in the image. The underlying process is what Marx tries to get at with his concepts of the labour process, use value, exchange value, surplus value, commodification, the ‘dead’ labour embedded in commodities, commodities as ‘abstract reality’ –  abstract ‘reality’ because it is the product of social relations.

to be continued ……………..